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185d6146ee4a-2 | criteria: they are not seen as fun to be with, and they don’t know how
to make another child feel good. Observations of unpopular children
at play show, for example, that they are much more likely than others | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b2f931d05c88-0 | to cheat, sulk, quit when losing, or show off and brag about winning.
Of course, most children want to win at a game—but win or lose,
most children are able to contain their emotional reaction so that it
does not undermine the relationship with the friend they play games
with.
While children who are socially tone-deaf—who continually have
trouble reading and responding to emotions—end up as social
isolates, this does not apply, of course, to children who go through a
temporary period of feeling left out. But for those who are continually
excluded and rejected, their painful outcast status clings to them as
they continue their school years. The consequences of ending up at
the social margins are potentially great as a child continues on into
adulthood. For one, it is in the cauldron of close friendships and the
tumult of play that children refine the social and emotional skills that
they will bring to relationships later in life. Children who are
excluded from this realm of learning are, inevitably, disadvantaged.
Understandably, those who are rejected report great anxiety and
many worries, as well as being depressed and lonely. In fact, how
popular a child was in third grade has been shown to be a better | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b2f931d05c88-1 | predictor of mental-health problems at age eighteen than anything
else—teachers’ and nurses’ ratings, school performance and IQ, even
scores on psychological tests.
44
And, as we have seen, in later stages
of life people who have few friends and are chronically lonely are at
greater risk for medical diseases and an early death.
As psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan pointed out, we learn how to
negotiate intimate relations—to work out differences and share our
deepest feelings—in our first close friendships with same-sex chums.
But children who are socially rejected are only half as likely as their
peers to have a best friend during the crucial years of elementary
school, and so miss out on one of the essential chances for emotional
growth.
45
One friend can make the difference—even when all others
turn their backs (and even when that friendship is not all that solid).
COACHING FOR FRIENDSHIP
There is hope for rejected children, despite their ineptness. Steven
Asher, a University of Illinois psychologist, has designed a series of
“friendship coaching” sessions for unpopular children that has shown
some success.
46
Identifying third and fourth graders who were the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bab18a28eef2-0 | least liked in their classes, Asher gave them six sessions in how to
“make playing games more fun” through being “friendly, fun, and
nice.” To avoid stigma, the children were told that they were acting as
“consultants” to the coach, who was trying to learn what kinds of
things make it more enjoyable to play games.
The children were coached to act in ways Asher had found typical
of more popular children. For example, they were encouraged to think
of alternative
suggestions and compromises (rather than fighting) if
they disagree about the rules; to remember to talk with and ask
questions about the other child while they play; to listen and look at
the other child to see how he’s doing; to say something nice when the
other person does well; to smile and offer help or suggestions and
encouragement. The children also tried out these basic social
amenities while playing games such as Pick-up Sticks with a
classmate, and were coached afterward on how well they did. This
minicourse in getting along had a remarkable effect: a year later the
children who were coached—all of whom were selected because they
were the least-liked in their class—were now solidly in the middle of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bab18a28eef2-1 | classroom popularity. None were social stars, but none were rejects.
Similar results have been found by Stephen Nowicki, an Emory
University psychologist.
47
His program trains social outcasts to hone
their ability to read and respond appropriately to other children’s
feelings. The children, for example, are videotaped while practicing
expression of feelings such as happiness and sadness, and are coached
to improve their emotional expressiveness. They then try out their
newly honed skills with a child they want to make friends with.
Such programs have reported a 50 to 60 percent success rate in
raising the popularity of rejected children. These programs (at least as
presently designed) seem to work best for third and fourth graders
rather than children in higher grades, and to be more helpful for
socially inept children than for highly aggressive ones. But that is all a
matter for fine-tuning; the hopeful sign is that many or most rejected
children can be brought into the circle of friendship with some basic
emotional coaching.
DRINKING AND DRUGS: ADDICTION AS SELF-MEDICATION
Students at the local campus call it
drinking to black
—bingeing on beer
to the point of passing out. One of the techniques: attach a funnel to a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
45c5d6803f50-0 | garden hose, so that a can of beer can be downed in about ten
seconds. The method is not an isolated oddity. One survey found that
two fifths of male college students down seven or more drinks at a
time, while 11 percent call themselves “heavy drinkers.” Another
term, of course, might be “alcoholics.”
48
About half of college men
and almost 40 percent of women have at least two binge-drinking
episodes in a month.
49
While in the United States use of most drugs among young people
generally tapered off in the 1980s, there is a steady trend toward
more alcohol use
at ever-younger ages. A 1993 survey found that 35
percent of college women said they drank to get drunk, while just 10
percent did so in 1977; overall, one in three students drinks to get
drunk. That poses other risks: 90 percent of all rapes reported on
college campuses happened when either the assailant or the victim—
or both—had been drinking.
50
Alcohol-related accidents are the
leading cause of death among young people between fifteen and
twenty-four.
51
Experimentation with drugs and alcohol might seem a rite of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
45c5d6803f50-1 | 51
Experimentation with drugs and alcohol might seem a rite of
passage for adolescents, but this first taste can have long-lasting
results for some. For most alcoholics and drug abusers, the beginnings
of addiction can be traced to their teen years, though few of those
who so experiment end up as alcoholics or drug abusers. By the time
students leave high school, over 90 percent have tried alcohol, yet
only about 14 percent eventually become alcoholics; of the millions of
Americans who experimented with cocaine, fewer than 5 percent
became addicted.
52
What makes the difference?
To be sure, those living in high-crime neighborhoods, where crack
is sold on the corner and the drug dealer is the most prominent local
model of economic success, are most at risk for substance abuse. Some
may end up addicted through becoming small-time dealers
themselves, others simply because of the easy access or a peer culture
that glamorizes drugs—a factor that heightens the risk of drug use in
any neighborhood, even (and perhaps especially) the most well-off.
But still the question remains, of the pool of those exposed to these
lures and pressures, and who go on to experiment, which ones are | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
45c5d6803f50-2 | most likely to end up with a lasting habit?
One current scientific theory is that those who stay with the habit,
becoming increasingly dependent on alcohol or drugs, are using these
substances as a medication of sorts, a way to soothe feelings of
anxiety, anger, or depression. Through their early experimentation | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d02583b50253-0 | they hit upon a chemical fix, a way to calm the feelings of anxiety or
melancholy that have tormented them. Thus of several hundred
seventh- and eighth-grade students tracked for two years, it was those
who reported higher levels of emotional distress who subsequently
went on to have the highest rates of substance abuse.
53
This may
explain why so many young people are able to experiment with drugs
and drinking without becoming addicted, while others become
dependent almost from the start: those most vulnerable to addiction
seem to find in the drug or alcohol an instant way to soothe emotions
that have distressed them for years.
As Ralph Tarter, a psychologist at the Western Psychiatric Institute
and Clinic in Pittsburgh, put it, “For people who are biologically
predisposed, the
first drink or dose of a drug is immensely reinforcing,
in a way others just don’t experience. Many recovering drug abusers
tell me, ‘The moment I took my first drug, I felt normal for the first
time.’ It stabilizes them physiologically, at least in the short term.”
54
That, of course, is the devil’s bargain of addiction: a short-term good
feeling in exchange for the steady meltdown of one’s life. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d02583b50253-1 | Certain emotional patterns seem to make people more likely to find
emotional relief in one substance rather than another. For example,
there are two emotional pathways to alcoholism. One starts with
someone who was high-strung and anxious in childhood, who
typically discovers as a teenager that alcohol will calm the anxiety.
Very often they are children—usually sons—of alcoholics who
themselves have turned to alcohol to soothe their nerves. One
biological marker for this pattern is undersecretion of GABA, a
neurotransmitter that regulates anxiety—too little GABA is
experienced as a high level of tension. One study found that sons of
alcoholic fathers had low levels of GABA and were highly anxious, but
when they drank alcohol, their GABA levels rose as their anxiety
fell.
55
These sons of alcoholics drink to ease their tension, finding in
alcohol a relaxation that they could not seem to get otherwise. Such
people may be vulnerable to abusing sedatives as well as alcohol for
the same anxiety-reduction effect.
A neuropsychological study of sons of alcoholics who at age twelve
showed signs of anxiety such as a heightened heart rate in response to
stress, as well as impulsivity, found the boys also had poor frontal | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d02583b50253-2 | lobe functioning.
56
Thus the brain areas that might have helped ease
their anxiety or control their impulsiveness brought them less help
than in other boys. And since the pre-frontal lobes also handle | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
733eba3b8903-0 | working memory—which holds in mind the consequences of various
routes of action while making a decision—their deficit could support a
slide into alcoholism by helping them ignore the long-term drawbacks
of drinking, even as they found an immediate sedation from anxiety
through alcohol.
This craving for calm seems to be an emotional marker of a genetic
susceptibility to alcoholism. A study of thirteen hundred relatives of
alcoholics found that the children of alcoholics who were most at risk
for becoming alcoholics themselves were those who reported having
chronically high levels of anxiety. Indeed, the researchers concluded
that alcoholism develops in such people as “self-medication of anxiety
symptoms.”
57
A second emotional pathway to alcoholism comes from a high level
of agitation, impulsivity, and boredom. This pattern shows up in
infancy as
being restless, cranky, and hard to handle, in grade school
as having the “fidgets,” hyperactivity, and getting into trouble, a
propensity that, as we have seen, can push such children to seek out
friends on the fringe—sometimes leading to a criminal career or the
diagnosis of “antisocial personality disorder.” Such people (and they
are mainly men) have as their main emotional complaint agitation; | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
733eba3b8903-1 | their main weakness is unrestrained impulsivity; their usual reaction
to boredom—which they often feel—is an impulsive search for risk
and excitement. As adults, people with this pattern (which may be
tied to deficiencies in two other neurotransmitters, serotonin and
MAO) find that alcohol can soothe their agitation. And the fact that
they can’t stand monotony makes them ready to try anything; coupled
with their general impulsivity, it makes them prone to abusing an
almost random list of drugs besides alcohol.
58
While depression can drive some to drink, the metabolic effects of
alcohol often simply worsen the depression after a short lift. People
who turn to alcohol as an emotional palliative do so much more often
to calm anxiety than for depression; an entirely different class of
drugs soothes the feelings of people who are depressed—at least
temporarily. Feeling chronically unhappy puts people at greater risk
for addiction to stimulants such as cocaine, which provide a direct
antidote to feeling depressed. One study found that more than half the
patients being treated at a clinic for cocaine addiction would have
been diagnosed with severe depression before they started their habit, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
733eba3b8903-2 | and the deeper the preceding depression, the stronger the habit.
59
Chronic anger may lead to still another kind of susceptibility. In a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e9f791c430cb-0 | study of four hundred patients being treated for addiction to heroin
and other opioids, the most striking emotional pattern was a lifelong
difficulty handling anger and a quickness to rage. Some of the patients
themselves said that with opiates they finally felt normal and
relaxed.
60
Though the predisposition to substance abuse may, in many cases,
be brain-based, the feelings that drive people to “self-medicate”
themselves through drink or drugs can be handled without recourse to
medication, as Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs
have demonstrated for decades. Acquiring the ability to handle those
feelings—soothing anxiety, lifting depression, calming rage—removes
the impetus to use drugs or alcohol in the first place. These basic
emotional skills are taught remedially in treatment programs for drug
and alcohol abuse. It would be far better, of course, if they were
learned early in life, well before the habit became established.
NO MORE WARS: A FINAL COMMON PREVENTIVE PATHWAY
Over the last decade or so “wars” have been proclaimed, in turn, on
teen pregnancy, dropping out, drugs, and most recently violence. The | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e9f791c430cb-1 | trouble with such campaigns, though, is that they come too late, after
the targeted problem has reached epidemic proportions and taken
firm root in the lives of the young. They are crisis intervention, the
equivalent of solving a problem by sending an ambulance to the
rescue rather than giving an inoculation that would ward off the
disease in the first place. Instead of more such “wars,” what we need
is to follow the logic of prevention, offering our children the skills for
facing life that will increase their chances of avoiding any and all of
these fates.
61
My focus on the place of emotional and social deficits is not to deny
the role of other risk factors, such as growing up in a fragmented,
abusive, or chaotic family, or in an impoverished, crime- and drug-
ridden neighborhood. Poverty itself delivers emotional blows to
children: poorer children at age five are already more fearful, anxious,
and sad than their better-off peers, and have more behavior problems
such as frequent tantrums and destroying things, a trend that
continues through the teen years. The press of poverty corrodes family
life too: there tend to be fewer expressions of parental warmth, more | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e9f791c430cb-2 | depression in mothers (who are often single and jobless), and a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
22e541b23367-0 | greater reliance on harsh punishments such as yelling, hitting, and
physical threats.
62
But there is a role that emotional competence plays over and above
family and economic forces—it may be decisive in determining the
extent to which any given child or teenager is undone by these
hardships or finds a core of resilience to survive them. Long-term
studies of hundreds of children brought up in poverty, in abusive
families, or by a parent with severe mental illness show that those
who are resilient even in the face of the most grinding hardships tend
to share key emotional skills.
63
These include a winning sociability
that draws people to them, self-confidence, an optimistic persistence
in the face of failure and frustration, the ability to recover quickly
from upsets, and an easygoing nature.
But the vast majority of children face such difficulties without these
advantages. Of course, many of these skills are innate, the luck of
genes—but even qualities of temperament can change for the better,
as we saw in
Chapter 14
. One line of intervention, of course, is
political and economic, alleviating the poverty and other social
conditions that breed these problems. But apart from these tactics | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
22e541b23367-1 | conditions that breed these problems. But apart from these tactics
(which seem to move ever lower on the social agenda)
there is much
that can be offered to children to help them grapple better with such
debilitating hardships.
Take the case of emotional disorders, afflictions that about one in
two Americans experiences over the course of life. A study of a
representative sample of 8,098 Americans found that 48 percent
suffered from at least one psychiatric problem during their lifetime.
64
Most severely affected were the 14 percent of people who developed
three or more psychiatric problems at once. This group was the most
troubled, accounting for 60 percent of all psychiatric disorders
occurring at any one time, and 90 percent of the most severe and
disabling ones. While they need intensive care now, the optimal
approach would be, wherever possible, to prevent these problems in
the first place. To be sure, not every mental disorder can be prevented
—but there are some, and perhaps many, that can. Ronald Kessler, the
University of Michigan sociologist who did the study, told me, “We
need to intervene early in life. Take a young girl who has a social
phobia in the sixth grade, and starts drinking in junior high school to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
22e541b23367-2 | handle her social anxieties. By her late twenties, when she shows up
in our study, she’s still fearful, has become both an alcohol and drug
abuser, and is depressed because her life is so messed up. The big | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8477867062e3-0 | question is, what could we have done early in her life to have headed
off the whole downward spiral?”
The same holds, of course, for dropping out or violence, or most of
the litany of perils faced by young people today. Educational
programs to prevent one or another specific problem such as drug use
and violence have proliferated wildly in the last decade or so, creating
a mini-industry within the education marketplace. But many of them
—including many of the most slickly marketed and most widely used
—have proven to be ineffective. A few, to the chagrin of educators,
even seemed to increase the likelihood of the problems they were
meant to head off, particularly drug abuse and teen sex.
Information Is Not Enough
An instructive case in point is sexual abuse of children. As of 1993,
about two hundred thousand substantiated cases were reported
annually in the United States, with that number growing by about 10
percent per year. And while estimates vary widely, most experts agree
that between 20 and 30 percent of girls and about half that number of
boys are victims of some form of sexual abuse by age seventeen (the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8477867062e3-1 | figures rise or fall depending on how sexual abuse is defined, among
other factors).
65
There is no single profile of a child
who is
particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse, but most feel unprotected,
unable to resist on their own, and isolated by what has happened to
them.
With these risks in mind, many schools have begun to offer
programs to prevent sexual abuse. Most such programs are tightly
focused on basic information about sexual abuse, teaching kids, for
example, to know the difference between “good” and “bad” touching,
alerting them to the dangers, and encouraging them to tell an adult if
anything untoward happens to them. But a national survey of two
thousand children found that this basic training was little better than
nothing—or actually worse than nothing—in helping children do
something to prevent being victimized, whether by a school bully or a
potential child molester.
66
Worse, the children who had only such
basic programs and who had subsequently become victims of sexual
assault were actually
half
as likely to report it afterward than were
children who had had no programs at all.
By contrast, children given more comprehensive training—
including related emotional and social competences—were better able | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e205e6b00563-0 | to protect themselves against the threat of being victimized: they were
far more likely to demand to be left alone, to yell or fight back, to
threaten to tell, and to actually tell if something bad did happen to
them. This last benefit—reporting the abuse—is preventive in a telling
sense: many child molesters victimize hundreds of children. A study of
child molesters in their forties found that, on average, they had one
victim a month since their teenage years. A report on a bus driver and
a high-school computer teacher reveals they molested about three
hundred children each year between them—yet not one of the
children reported the sexual abuse; the abuse came to light only after
one of the boys who had been abused by the teacher started to
sexually abuse his sister.
67
Those children who got the more comprehensive programs were
three times more likely than those in minimal programs to report
abuse. What worked so well? These programs were not one-shot
topics, but were given at different levels several times over the course
of a child’s school career, as part of health or sex education. They
enlisted parents to deliver the message to the child along with what | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e205e6b00563-1 | enlisted parents to deliver the message to the child along with what
was taught in school (children whose parents did this were the very
best at resisting threats of sexual abuse).
Beyond that, social and emotional competences made the
difference. It is not enough for a child simply to know about “good”
and “bad” touching; children need the self-awareness to know when a
situation
feels
wrong or distressing long before the touching begins.
This entails not just self-awareness, but also enough self-confidence
and assertiveness to trust and act on those feelings of distress, even in
the face of an adult who may be trying to
reassure her that “it’s okay.”
And then a child needs a repertoire of ways to disrupt what is about
to happen—everything from running away to threatening to tell. For
these reasons, the better programs teach children to stand up for what
they want, to assert their rights rather than be passive, to know what
their boundaries are and defend them.
The most effective programs, then, supplemented the basic sexual-
abuse information with essential emotional and social skills. These
programs taught children to find ways to solve interpersonal conflicts
more positively, to have more self-confidence, not to blame | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e205e6b00563-2 | more positively, to have more self-confidence, not to blame
themselves if something happened, and to feel they had a network of
support in teachers and parents whom they could turn to. And if
something bad did happen to them, they were far more likely to tell. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
87d8f5c6d179-0 | The Active Ingredients
Such findings have led to a reenvisioning of what the ingredients of
an optimal prevention program should be, based on those that
impartial evaluations showed to be truly effective. In a five-year
project sponsored by the W. T. Grant Foundation, a consortium of
researchers studied this landscape and distilled the active ingredients
that seemed crucial to the success of those programs that worked.
68
The list of key skills the consortium concluded should be covered, no
matter what specific problem it is designed to prevent, reads like the
ingredients of emotional intelligence (see
Appendix D
for the full
list).
69
The emotional skills include self-awareness; identifying, expressing,
and managing feelings; impulse control and delaying gratification;
and handling stress and anxiety. A key ability in impulse control is
knowing the difference between feelings and actions, and learning to
make better emotional decisions by first controlling the impulse to
act, then identifying alternative actions and their consequences before
acting. Many competences are interpersonal: reading social and
emotional cues, listening, being able to resist negative influences,
taking others’ perspectives, and understanding what behavior is
acceptable in a situation.
These are among the core emotional and social skills for life, and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
87d8f5c6d179-1 | These are among the core emotional and social skills for life, and
include at least partial remedies for most, if not all, of the difficulties I
have discussed in this chapter. The choice of specific problems these
skills might inoculate against is nearly arbitrary—similar cases for the
role of emotional and social competences could have been made for,
say, unwanted teen pregnancy or teen suicide.
To be sure, the causes of all such problems are complex,
interweaving differing ratios of biological destiny, family dynamics,
the politics of poverty, and the culture of the streets. No single kind of
intervention, including one targeting emotions, can claim to do the
whole job. But to the degree emotional deficits add to a child’s risk—
and we have seen that they add a great deal—attention must be paid
to emotional remedies, not to the exclusion of other answers, but
along with them. The next question is, what would an education in
the emotions look like?
*
In children, unlike adults, medication is not a clear alternative to therapy or preventive
education for treating depression; children metabolize medications differently than do adults.
Tricyclic antidepressants, often successful with adults, have failed in controlled studies with | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f9592621cbd9-0 | children to prove better than an inactive placebo drug. Newer depression medications,
including Prozac, are as yet untested for use in children. And desipramine, one of the most
common (and safest) tricyclics used with adults, has, at this writing, become the focus of FDA
scrutiny as a possible cause of death in children. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
2b071f974684-0 | 16
Schooling the Emotions
The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth
.
—E
RASMUS
It’s a strange roll call, going around the circle of fifteen fifth graders
sitting Indian-style on the floor. As a teacher calls their names the
students respond not with the vacant “Here” standard in schools, but
instead call out a number that indicates how they feel; one means low
spirits, ten high energy.
Today spirits are high:
“Jessica.”
“Ten: I’m jazzed, it’s Friday.”
“Patrick.”
“Nine: excited, a little nervous.”
“Nicole.”
“Ten: peaceful, happy …”
It’s a class in Self Science at the Nueva School, a school retrofitted
into what used to be the grand manse of the Crocker family, the
dynasty that founded one of San Francisco’s biggest banks. Now the
building, which resembles a miniature version of the San Francisco
Opera House, houses a private school that offers what may be a model
course in emotional intelligence.
The subject in Self Science is feelings—your own and those that
erupt in relationships. The topic, by its very nature, demands that
teachers and students focus on the emotional fabric of a child’s life—a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
2b071f974684-1 | teachers and students focus on the emotional fabric of a child’s life—a
focus that is determinedly ignored in almost every other classroom in
America. The strategy
here includes using the tensions and traumas of
children’s lives as the topic of the day. Teachers speak to real issues—
hurt over being left out, envy, disagreements that could escalate into a
schoolyard battle. As Karen Stone McCown, developer of the Self
Science Curriculum and founder of Nueva, put it, “Learning doesn’t
take place in isolation from kids’ feelings. Being emotionally literate is
as important for learning as instruction in math and reading.”
1 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
864620c3ed55-0 | Self Science is a pioneer, an early harbinger of an idea that is
spreading to schools coast to coast.
*
Names for these classes range
from “social development” to “life skills” to “social and emotional
learning.” Some, referring to Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple
intelligences, use the term “personal intelligences.” The common
thread is the goal of raising the level of social and emotional
competence in children as a part of their regular education—not just
something taught remedially to children who are faltering and
identified as “troubled,” but a set of skills and understandings
essential for every child.
The emotional-literacy courses have some remote roots in the
affective-education movement of the 1960s. The thinking then was
that psychological and motivational lessons were more deeply learned
if they involved an immediate experience of what was being taught
conceptually. The emotional-literacy movement, though, turns the
term
affective education
inside out—instead of using affect to educate,
it educates affect itself.
More immediately, many of these courses and the momentum for
their spread come from an ongoing series of school-based prevention
programs, each targeting a specific problem: teen smoking, drug | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
864620c3ed55-1 | programs, each targeting a specific problem: teen smoking, drug
abuse, pregnancy, dropping out, and most recently violence. As we
saw in the last chapter, the W. T. Grant Consortium’s study of
prevention programs found they are far more effective when they
teach a core of emotional and social competences, such as impulse
control, managing anger, and finding creative solutions to social
predicaments. From this principle a new generation of interventions
has emerged.
As we saw in
Chapter 15
, interventions designed to target the
specific deficits in emotional and social skills that undergird problems
such as aggression or depression can be highly effective as buffers for
children. But those well-designed interventions, in the main, have
been run by research psychologists
as experiments. The next step is to
take the lessons learned from such highly focused programs and
generalize them as a preventive measure for the entire school
population, taught by ordinary teachers.
This more sophisticated and more effective approach to prevention
includes information about problems such as AIDS, drugs, and the
like, at the points in youngsters’ lives when they are beginning to face
them. But its main, ongoing subject is the core competence that is | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
864620c3ed55-2 | brought to bear on any of these specific dilemmas: emotional | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
34d544495db6-0 | intelligence.
This new departure in bringing emotional literacy into schools
makes emotions and social life themselves topics, rather than treating
these most compelling facets of a child’s day as irrelevant intrusions
or, when they lead to eruptions, relegating them to occasional
disciplinary trips to the guidance counselor or the principal’s office.
The classes themselves may at first glance seem uneventful, much
less a solution to the dramatic problems they address. But that is
largely because, like good childrearing at home, the lessons imparted
are small but telling, delivered regularly and over a sustained period
of years. That is how emotional learning becomes ingrained; as
experiences are repeated over and over, the brain reflects them as
strengthened pathways, neural habits to apply in times of duress,
frustration, hurt. And while the everyday substance of emotional
literacy classes may look mundane, the outcome—decent human
beings—is more critical to our future than ever.
A LESSON IN COOPERATION
Compare a moment from a class in Self Science with the classroom
experiences you can recall.
A fifth-grade group is about to play the Cooperation Squares game,
in which the students team up to put together a series of square- | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
34d544495db6-1 | shaped jigsaw puzzles. The catch: their teamwork is all in silence,
with no gesturing allowed.
The teacher, Jo-An Vargo, divides the class into three groups, each
assigned to a different table. Three observers, each familiar with the
game, get an evaluation sheet to assess, for example, who in the group
takes the lead in organizing, who is a clown, who disrupts.
The students dump the pieces of the puzzles on the table and go to
work. Within a minute or so it’s clear that one group is surprisingly
efficient as a team; they finish in just a few minutes. A second group
of four is engaged in
solitary, parallel efforts, each working separately
on their own puzzle, but getting nowhere. Then they slowly start to
work collectively to assemble their first square, and continue to work
as a unit until all the puzzles are solved.
But the third group still struggles, with only one puzzle nearing
completion, and even that looking more like a trapezoid than a
square. Sean, Fairlie, and Rahman have yet to find the smooth | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4ac1fd768607-0 | coordination that the other two groups fell into. They are clearly
frustrated, frantically scanning the pieces on the table, seizing on
likely possibilities and putting them near the partly finished squares,
only to be disappointed by the lack of fit.
The tension breaks a bit when Rahman takes two of the pieces and
puts them in front of his eyes like a mask; his partners giggle. This
will prove to be a pivotal moment in the day’s lesson.
Jo-An Vargo, the teacher, offers some encouragement: “Those of
you who have finished can give one specific hint to those who are still
working.”
Dagan moseys over to the still-struggling group, points to two
pieces that jut out from the square, and suggests, “You’ve got to move
those two pieces around.” Suddenly Rahman, his wide face furrowed
in concentration, grasps the new gestalt, and the pieces quickly fall
into place on the first puzzle, then the others. There’s spontaneous
applause as the last piece falls into place on the third group’s final
puzzle.
A POINT OF CONTENTION
But as the class goes on to mull over the object lessons in teamwork
they’ve received, there is another, more intense interchange. Rahman, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4ac1fd768607-1 | tall and with a shock of bushy black hair cut into a longish crew cut,
and Tucker, the group’s observer, are locked in contentious discussion
over the rule that you can’t gesture. Tucker, his blond hair neatly
combed except for a cowlick, wears a baggy blue T-shirt emblazoned
with the motto “Be Responsible,” which somehow underscores his
official role.
“You can
too
offer a piece—that’s not gesturing,” Tucker says to
Rahman in an emphatic, argumentative tone.
“But that
is
gesturing,” Rahman insists, vehement.
Vargo notices the heightened volume and increasingly aggressive
staccato of the exchange, and gravitates to their table. This is a critical
incident, a spontaneous exchange of heated feeling; it is in moments
such as this that the lessons already learned will pay off, and new
ones can be taught most
profitably. And, as every good teacher
knows, the lessons applied in such electric moments will last in
students’ memories.
“This isn’t a criticism—you cooperated very well—but Tucker, try | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e58f1503e81a-0 | to say what you mean in a tone of voice that doesn’t sound so
critical,” Vargo coaches.
Tucker, his voice calmer now, says to Rahman, “You can just put a
piece where you think it goes, give someone what you think they
need, without gesturing. Just offering.”
Rahman responds in an angry tone, “You could have just gone like
this”—he scratches his head to illustrate an innocent movement
—“and he’d say ‘No gesturing!’ ”
There is clearly more to Rahman’s ire than this dispute about what
does or does not constitute a gesture. His eyes constantly go to the
evaluation sheet Tucker has filled out, which—though it has not yet
been mentioned—has actually provoked the tension between Tucker
and Rahman. On the evaluation sheet Tucker has listed Rahman’s
name in the blank for “Who is disruptive?”
Vargo, noticing Rahman looking at the offending form, hazards a
guess, saying to Tucker, “He’s feeling that you used a negative word
—
disruptive
—about him. What did you mean?”
“I didn’t mean it was a
bad
kind of disruption,” says Tucker, now
conciliatory. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e58f1503e81a-1 | bad
kind of disruption,” says Tucker, now
conciliatory.
Rahman isn’t buying it, but his voice is calmer, too: “That’s a little
farfetched, if you ask me.”
Vargo emphasizes a positive way of seeing it. “Tucker is trying to
say that what could be considered disruptive could also be part of
lightening things up during a frustrating time.”
“But,” Rahman protests, now more matter-of-fact,
“disruptive is
like
when we’re all concentrating hard on something and if I went like
this”—he makes a ridiculous, clowning expression, his eyes bulging,
cheeks puffed out—“that would be disruptive.”
Vargo tries more emotional coaching, telling Tucker, “In trying to
help, you didn’t mean he was disruptive in a bad way. But you send a
different message in how you’re talking about it. Rahman is needing
you to hear and accept his feelings. Rahman was saying that having
negative words like
disruptive feels
unfair. He doesn’t like being called
that.”
Then, to Rahman, she adds, “I appreciate the way you’re being
assertive in talking with Tucker. You’re not attacking. But it’s not | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e58f1503e81a-2 | pleasant to have a label
like
disruptive
put on you. When you put those
pieces up to your eyes it seems like you were feeling frustrated and
wanted to lighten things up. But Tucker called it disruptive because
he didn’t understand your intent. Is that right?” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6e28b7e9acca-0 | Both boys nod assent as the other students finish clearing away the
puzzles. This small classroom melodrama is reaching its finale. “Do
you feel better?” Vargo asks. “Or is this still distressing?”
“Yeah, I feel okay,” says Rahman, his voice softer now that he feels
heard and understood. Tucker nods, too, smiling. The boys, noticing
that everyone else has already left for the next class, turn in unison
and dash out together.
POSTMORTEM: A FIGHT THAT DID NOT BREAK OUT
As a new group starts to find their chairs, Vargo dissects what has just
transpired. The heated exchange and its cooling-down draw on what
the boys have been learning about conflict resolution. What typically
escalates to conflict begins, as Vargo puts it, with “not
communicating, making assumptions, and jumping to conclusions,
sending a ‘hard’ message in ways that make it tough for people to
hear what you’re saying.”
Students in Self Science learn that the point is not to avoid conflict
completely, but to resolve disagreement and resentment before it
spirals into an out-and-out fight. There are signs of these earlier
lessons in how Tucker and Rahman handled the dispute. Both, for | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6e28b7e9acca-1 | example, made some effort to express their point of view in a way
that would not accelerate the conflict. This assertiveness (as distinct
from aggression or passivity) is taught at Nueva from third grade on.
It emphasizes expressing feelings forthrightly, but in a way that will
not spiral into aggression. While at the beginning of their dispute
neither boy was looking at the other, as it went on they began to
show signs of “active listening,” facing each other, making eye
contact, and sending the silent cues that let a speaker know that he is
being heard.
By putting these tools into action, helped along by some coaching,
“assertiveness” and “active listening” for these boys become more
than just empty phrases on a quiz—they become ways of reacting the
boys can draw on at those moments when they need them most
urgently.
Mastery in the emotional domain is especially difficult because
skills need to be acquired when people are usually least able to take in
new information and learn new habits of response—when they are
upset. Coaching in these moments helps. “Anyone, adult or fifth | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
02643696a767-0 | grader, needs some help being a self-observer
when they’re so upset,”
Vargo points out. “Your heart is pounding, your hands are sweaty,
you’re jittery, and you’re trying to listen clearly while keeping your
own self-control to get through it without screaming, blaming, or
clamming up in defensiveness.”
For anyone familiar with the rough-and-tumble of fifth-grade boys,
what may be most remarkable is that both Tucker and Rahman tried
to assert their views without resorting to blaming, name-calling, or
yelling. Neither let their feelings escalate to a contemptuous “f——
you!” or a fistfight, nor cut off the other by stalking out of the room.
What could have been the seed of a full-fledged battle instead
heightened the boys’ mastery of the nuances of conflict resolution.
How differently it all could have gone in other circumstances.
Youngsters daily come to blows—and even worse—over less.
CONCERNS OF THE DAY
At the traditional circle that opens each class in Self Science, the
numbers are not always so high as they were today. When they are
low—the ones, twos, or threes that indicate feeling terrible—it opens | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
02643696a767-1 | the way for someone to ask, “Do you want to talk about why you feel
that way?” And, if the student wants (no one is pressured to talk
about things they don’t want to), it allows the airing of whatever is so
troubling—and the chance to consider creative options for handling it.
The troubles that emerge vary with the grade level. In the lower
grades typical ones are teasing, feeling left out, fears. Around sixth
grade a new set of concerns emerges—hurt feelings about not being
asked on a date, or being left out; friends who are immature; the
painful predicaments of the young (“Big kids are picking on me”; “My
friends are smoking, and they’re always trying to get me to try, too”).
These are the topics of gripping import in a child’s life, which are
aired on the periphery of school—at lunch, on the bus to school, at a
friend’s house—if at all. More often than not, these are the troubles
that children keep to themselves, obsessing about them alone at night,
having no one to mull them over with. In Self Science they can
become topics of the day.
Each of these discussions is potential grist for the explicit goal of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
02643696a767-2 | Each of these discussions is potential grist for the explicit goal of
Self Science, which is illuminating the child’s sense of self and
relationships with others. While the course has a lesson plan, it is | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d2d89a94db47-0 | flexible so that when moments such as the conflict between Rahman
and Tucker occur they can be capitalized on. The issues that students
bring up provide the living examples to
which students and teachers
alike can apply the skills they are learning, such as the conflict-
resolution methods that cooled down the heat between the two boys.
THE ABC’S OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
In use for close to twenty years, the Self Science curriculum stands as
a model for the teaching of emotional intelligence. The lessons
sometimes are surprisingly sophisticated; as Nueva’s director, Karen
Stone McCown, told me, “When we teach about anger, we help kids
understand that it is almost always a secondary reaction and to look
for what’s underneath—are you hurt? jealous? Our kids learn that you
always have choices about how you respond to emotion, and the more
ways you know to respond to an emotion, the richer your life can be.”
A list of the contents of Self Science is an almost point-for-point
match with the ingredients of emotional intelligence—and with the
core skills recommended as primary prevention for the range of
pitfalls threatening children (see
Appendix E
for the full list).
2
The
topics taught include self-awareness, in the sense of recognizing | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d2d89a94db47-1 | The
topics taught include self-awareness, in the sense of recognizing
feelings and building a vocabulary for them, and seeing the links
between thoughts, feelings, and reactions; knowing if thoughts or
feelings are ruling a decision; seeing the consequences of alternative
choices; and applying these insights to decisions about such issues as
drugs, smoking, and sex. Self-awareness also takes the form of
recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, and seeing yourself in a
positive but realistic light (and so avoiding a common pitfall of the
self-esteem movement).
Another emphasis is managing emotions: realizing what is behind a
feeling (for example, the hurt that triggers anger), and learning ways
to handle anxieties, anger, and sadness. Still another emphasis is on
taking responsibility for decisions and actions, and following through
on commitments.
A key social ability is empathy, understanding others’ feelings and
taking their perspective, and respecting differences in how people feel
about things. Relationships are a major focus, including learning to be
a good listener and question-asker; distinguishing between what
someone says or does and your own reactions and judgments; being | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fa5d15d09fc5-0 | assertive rather than angry or passive; and learning the arts of
cooperation, conflict resolution, and negotiating compromise.
There are no grades given in Self Science; life itself is the final
exam. But at the end of the eighth grade, as students are about to
leave Nueva for high
school, each is given a Socratic examination, an
oral test in Self Science. One question from a recent final: “Describe
an appropriate response to help a friend solve a conflict over someone
pressuring them to try drugs, or over a friend who likes to tease.” Or,
“What are some healthy ways to deal with stress, anger, and fear?”
Were he alive today, Aristotle, so concerned with emotional
skillfulness, might well approve.
EMOTIONAL LITERACY IN THE INNER CITY
Skeptics understandably will ask if a course like Self Science could
work in a less privileged setting, or if it is only possible in a small
private school like Nueva, where every child is, in some respect,
gifted. In short, can emotional competence be taught where it may be
most urgently needed, in the gritty chaos of an inner-city public
school? One answer is to visit the Augusta Lewis Troup Middle School
in New Haven, which is as far from the Nueva School socially and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fa5d15d09fc5-1 | economically as it is geographically.
To be sure, the atmosphere at Troup has much of the same
excitement about learning—the school is also known as the Troup
Magnet Academy of Science and is one of two such schools in the
district that are designed to draw fifth- to eighth-grade students from
all over New Haven to an enriched science curriculum. Students there
can ask questions about the physics of outer space through a satellite-
dish hookup to astronauts in Houston or program their computers to
play music. But despite these academic amenities, as in many cities,
white flight to the New Haven suburbs and to private schools has left
Troup’s enrollment about 95 percent black and Hispanic.
Just a few short blocks from the Yale campus—and again a distant
universe—Troup is in a decaying working-class neighborhood that, in
the 1950s, had twenty thousand people employed in nearby factories,
from Olin Brass Mills to Winchester Arms. Today that job base has
shrunk to under three thousand, shrinking with it the economic
horizons of the families who live there. New Haven, like so many
other New England manufacturing cities, has sunk into a pit of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b42cecbec9a5-0 | poverty, drugs, and violence.
It was in response to the urgencies of this urban nightmare that in
the 1980s a group of Yale psychologists and educators designed the
Social Competence Program, a set of courses that covers virtually the
same terrain as the Nueva School’s Self Science curriculum. But at
Troup the connection to the topics is often more direct and raw. It is
no mere academic exercise when, in
the eighth-grade sex education
class, students learn how personal decision-making can help them
avoid diseases such as AIDS. New Haven has the highest proportion of
women with AIDS in the United States; a number of the mothers who
send their children to Troup have the disease—and so do some of the
students there. Despite the enriched curriculum, students at Troup
struggle with all the problems of the inner city; many children have
home situations so chaotic, if not horrific, they just cannot manage to
get to school some days.
As in all New Haven schools, the most prominent sign that greets a
visitor is in the familiar form of a yellow diamond-shaped traffic sign,
but reads “Drug-Free Zone.” At the door is Mary Ellen Collins, the
school’s facilitator—an all-purpose ombudsman who sees to special | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b42cecbec9a5-1 | problems as they surface, and whose role includes helping teachers
with the demands of the social competence curriculum. If a teacher is
unsure of how to teach a lesson, Collins will come to the class to show
how.
“I taught in this school for twenty years,” Collins says, greeting me.
“Look at this neighborhood—I can’t see only teaching academic skills
anymore, with the problems these kids face just in living. Take the
kids here who are struggling because they have AIDS themselves or
it’s in their homes—I’m not sure they’d say it during the discussion on
AIDS, but once a kid knows a teacher will listen to an emotional
problem, not just academic ones, the avenue is open to have that
conversation.”
On the third floor of the old brick school Joyce Andrews is leading
her fifth graders through the social competence class they get three
times a week. Andrews, like all the other fifth-grade teachers, went to
a special summer course in how to teach it, but her exuberance
suggests the topics in social competence come naturally to her.
Today’s lesson is on identifying feelings; being able to name
feelings, and so better distinguish between them, is a key emotional | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b42cecbec9a5-2 | skill. Last night’s assignment was to bring in pictures of a person’s
face from a magazine, name which emotion the face displays, and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
22a4e48238f7-0 | explain how to tell the person has those feelings. After collecting the
assignment, Andrews lists the feelings on the board—sadness, worry,
excitement, happiness, and so on—and launches into a fast-paced
repartee with the eighteen students who managed to get to school that
day. Sitting in four-desk clusters, the students excitedly raise their
hands high, straining to catch her eye so they can give their answer.
As she adds
frustrated
to the list on the board, Andrews asks, “How
many people ever felt frustrated?” Every hand goes up.
“How do you feel when you’re frustrated?”
The answers come in a cascade: “Tired.” “Confused.” “You can’t
think right.” “Anxious.”
As
aggravated
is added to the list, Joyce says, “I know that one—
when does a teacher feel aggravated?”
“When everyone is talking,” a girl offers, smiling.
Without missing a beat, Andrews passes out a mimeographed
worksheet. In one column are faces of boys and girls, each displaying
one of the six basic emotions—happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid,
disgusted—and a description of the facial muscle activity underlying
each, for example:
A
FRAID: | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
22a4e48238f7-1 | each, for example:
A
FRAID:
• The mouth is open and drawn back.
• The eyes are open and the inner corners go up.
• The eyebrows are raised and drawn together.
• There are wrinkles in the middle of the forehead.
3
While they read through the sheet, expressions of fear, anger,
surprise, or disgust float over the faces of the kids in Andrews’s class
as they imitate the pictures and follow the facial-muscle recipes for
each emotion. This lesson comes straight from Paul Ekman’s research
on facial expression; as such, it is taught in most every college
introductory psychology course—and rarely, if ever, in grade school.
This elementary lesson in connecting a name with a feeling, and the
feeling with the facial expression that matches it, might seem so
obvious that it need not be taught at all. Yet it may serve as an
antidote to surprisingly common lapses in emotional literacy.
Schoolyard bullies, remember, often strike out in anger because they
misinterpret neutral messages and expressions as hostile, and girls | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
938f1679c49d-0 | who develop eating disorders fail to distinguish anger from anxiety
from hunger.
EMOTIONAL LITERACY IN DISGUISE
With the curriculum already besieged by a proliferation of new topics
and agendas, some teachers who understandably feel overburdened
resist taking extra time from the basics for yet another course. So an
emerging strategy in emotional education is not to create a new class,
but to blend lessons on feelings and relationships with other topics
already taught. Emotional lessons can merge naturally into reading
and writing, health, science, social studies,
and other standard courses
as well. While in the New Haven schools Life Skills is a separate topic
in some grades, in other years the social development curriculum
blends into courses such as reading or health. Some of the lessons are
even taught as part of math class—notably basic study skills such as
how to put aside distractions, motivate yourself to study, and manage
your impulses so you can attend to learning.
Some programs in emotional and social skills take no curriculum or
class time as a separate subject at all, but instead infiltrate their
lessons into the very fabric of school life. One model for this approach
—essentially, an invisible emotional and social competence course—is | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
938f1679c49d-1 | —essentially, an invisible emotional and social competence course—is
the Child Development Project, created by a team directed by
psychologist Eric Schaps. The project, based in Oakland, California, is
currently being tried in a handful of schools across the nation, most in
neighborhoods that share many of the troubles of New Haven’s
decaying core.
4
The project offers a prepackaged set of materials that fit into
existing courses. Thus first graders in their reading class get a story,
“Frog and Toad Are Friends,” in which Frog, eager to play with his
hibernating friend Toad, plays a trick on him to get him up early. The
story is used as a platform for a class discussion about friendship, and
issues such as how people feel when someone plays a trick on them. A
succession of adventures brings up topics such as self-consciousness,
being aware of a friend’s needs, what it feels like to be teased, and
sharing feelings with friends. A set curriculum plan offers increasingly
sophisticated stories as children go through the elementary and
middle-school grades, giving teachers entry points to discuss topics
such as empathy, perspective-taking, and caring. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8af6d2594c41-0 | Another way emotional lessons are woven into the fabric of existing
school life is through helping teachers rethink how to discipline
students who misbehave. The assumption in the Child Development
program is that such moments are ripe opportunities to teach children
skills that are lacking—impulse control, explaining their feelings,
resolving conflicts—and that there are better ways to discipline than
coercion. A teacher seeing three first graders pushing to be the first in
the lunchroom line might suggest that they each guess a number, and
let the winner go first. The immediate lesson is that there are
impartial, fair ways to settle such pint-size disputes, while the deeper
teaching is that disputes can be negotiated. And since that is an
approach those children can take with them to settle other similar
disputes (“Me first!” is, after all, epidemic in lower grades—if not
through much of life, in one form or another) it has a more positive
message than the ubiquitous, authoritarian “Stop that!”
THE EMOTIONAL TIMETABLE
“My friends Alice and Lynn won’t play with me.”
That poignant grievance is from a third-grade girl at John Muir
Elementary School in Seattle. The anonymous sender put it in the
“mailbox” in her classroom—actually a specially painted cardboard | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8af6d2594c41-1 | “mailbox” in her classroom—actually a specially painted cardboard
box—where she and her classmates are encouraged to write in their
complaints and problems so the whole class can talk about them and
try to think of ways to deal with them. The discussion will not
mention the names of those involved; instead the teacher points out
that all children share such problems from time to time, and they all
need to learn how to handle them. As they talk about how it feels to
be left out, or what they might do to be included, they have the
chance to try out new solutions to these quandaries—a corrective for
the one-track thinking that sees conflict as the only route to solving
disagreements.
The mailbox allows flexibility as to exactly which crises and issues
will become the subject of the class, for a too-rigid agenda can be out
of step with the fluid realities of childhood. As children change and
grow the preoccupation of the hour changes accordingly. To be most
effective, emotional lessons must be pegged to the development of the
child, and repeated at different ages in ways that fit a child’s changing
understanding and challenges. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c80f64d1fd0d-0 | One question is how early to begin. Some say the first few years of
life are none too soon. The Harvard pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton
proposes that many parents can benefit from being coached as
emotional mentors to their infants and toddlers, as some home-visit
programs do. A strong argument can be made for emphasizing social
and emotional skills more systematically in preschool programs such
as Head Start; as we saw in
Chapter 12
, children’s readiness to learn
depends to a large extent on acquiring some of these basic emotional
skills. The preschool years are crucial ones for laying foundation
skills, and there is some evidence that Head Start, when run well (an
important caveat), can have beneficial long-term emotional and social
effects on the lives of its graduates even into their early adult years—
fewer drug problems and arrests, better marriages, greater earning
power.
5
Such interventions work best when they track the emotional
timetable of development.
6
As the wail of newborns testifies, babies
have intense feelings from the moment they are born. But the
newborn’s brain is far from fully mature; as we saw in
Chapter 15
,
only as its nervous system reaches final development—a process that | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c80f64d1fd0d-1 | ,
only as its nervous system reaches final development—a process that
unfolds according to an innate biological clock over the entire course
of childhood and into early adolescence—will the child’s emotions
ripen completely. The newborn’s repertoire of feeling is
primitive
compared to the emotional range of a five-year-old, which, in turn, is
lacking when measured against the fullness of feelings of a teenager.
Indeed, adults all too readily fall into the trap of expecting children to
have reached a maturity far beyond their years, forgetting that each
emotion has its preprogrammed moment of appearance in a child’s
growth. A four-year-old’s braggadocio, for example, might bring a
parent’s reprimand—and yet the self-consciousness that can breed
humility typically does not emerge until age five or so.
The timetable for emotional growth is intertwined with allied lines
of development, particularly for cognition, on the one hand, and brain
and biological maturation, on the other. As we have seen, emotional
capacities such as empathy and emotional self-regulation start to build
virtually from infancy. The kindergarten year marks a peak ripening
of the “social emotions”—feelings such as insecurity and humility,
jealousy and envy, pride and confidence—all of which require the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c80f64d1fd0d-2 | jealousy and envy, pride and confidence—all of which require the
capacity for comparing oneself with others. The five-year-old, on
entering the wider social world of school, enters too the world of
social comparison. It is not just the external shift that elicits these | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
44fda67c7a81-0 | comparisons, but also the emergence of a cognitive skill: being able to
compare oneself to others on particular qualities, whether popularity,
attractiveness, or skateboarding talents. This is the age when, for
example, having an older sister who gets straight A’s can make the
younger sister start to think of herself as “dumb” by comparison.
Dr. David Hamburg, a psychiatrist and president of the Carnegie
Corporation, which has evaluated some pioneering emotional-
education programs, sees the years of transition into grade school and
then again into junior high or middle school as marking two crucial
points in a child’s adjustment.
7
From ages six to eleven, says
Hamburg, “school is a crucible and a defining experience that will
heavily influence children’s adolescence and beyond. A child’s sense
of self-worth depends substantially on his or her ability to achieve in
school. A child who fails in school sets in motion the self-defeating
attitudes that can dim prospects for an entire lifespan.” Among the
essentials for profiting from school, Hamburg notes, are an ability “to
postpone gratification, to be socially responsible in appropriate ways,
to maintain control over their emotions, and to have an optimistic | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
44fda67c7a81-1 | outlook”—in other words, emotional intelligence.
8
Puberty—because it is a time of extraordinary change in the child’s
biology, thinking capacities, and brain functioning—is also a crucial
time for emotional and social lessons. As for the teen years, Hamburg
observes that
“most adolescents are ten to fifteen years old when they
are exposed to sexuality, alcohol and drugs, smoking,” and other
temptations.
9
The transition to middle school or junior high marks an end to
childhood, and is itself a formidable emotional challenge. All other
problems aside, as they enter this new school arrangement virtually
all students have a dip in self-confidence and a jump in self-
consciousness; their very notions of themselves are rocky and in
tumult. One of the greatest specific blows is in “social self-esteem”—
students’ confidence that they can make and keep friends. It is at this
juncture, Hamburg points out, that it helps immensely to buttress
boys’ and girls’ abilities to build close relationships and navigate
crises in friendships, and to nurture their self-confidence.
Hamburg notes that as students are entering middle school, just on
the cusp of adolescence, there is something different about those who
have had emotional literacy classes: they find the new pressures of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
44fda67c7a81-2 | peer politics, the upping of academic demands, and the temptations to
smoke and use drugs less troubling than do their peers. They have | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ebf4a443a79c-0 | mastered emotional abilities that, at least for the short term, inoculate
them against the turmoil and pressures they are about to face.
TIMING IS ALL
As developmental psychologists and others map the growth of
emotions, they are able to be more specific about just what lessons
children should be learning at each point in the unfolding of
emotional intelligence, what the lasting deficits are likely to be for
those who fail to master the right competences at the appointed time,
and what remedial experiences might make up for what was missed.
In the New Haven program, for example, children in the youngest
grades get basic lessons in self-awareness, relationships, and decision-
making. In first grade students sit in a circle and roll the “feelings
cube,” which has words such as
sad
or
excited
on each side. At their
turn, they describe a time they had that feeling, an exercise that gives
them more certainty in tying feelings to words and helps with
empathy as they hear others having the same feelings as themselves.
By fourth and fifth grade, as peer relationships take on an immense
importance in their lives, they get lessons that help their friendships
work better: empathy, impulse control, and anger management. The
Life Skills class on | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ebf4a443a79c-1 | Life Skills class on
reading emotions from facial expressions that the
Troup school fifth graders were trying, for example, is essentially
about empathizing. For impulse control, there is a “stoplight” poster
displayed prominently, with six steps:
Red light
1. Stop, calm down, and think before you act.
Yellow light
2. Say the problem and how you feel.
3. Set a positive goal.
4. Think of lots of solutions.
5. Think ahead to the consequences.
Green Light
6. Go ahead and try the best plan.
The stoplight notion is regularly invoked when a child, for example,
is about to strike out in anger, or withdraw into a huff at some slight,
or burst into tears at being teased, and offers a concrete set of steps | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f297232a6229-0 | for dealing with these loaded moments in a more measured way.
Beyond the management of feelings, it points a way to more effective
action. And, as a habitual way of handling the unruly emotional
impulse—to think before acting from feelings—it can evolve into a
basic strategy for dealing with the risks of adolescence and beyond.
In sixth grade the lessons relate more directly to the temptations
and pressures for sex, drugs, or drinking that begin to enter children’s
lives. By ninth grade, as teenagers are confronted with more
ambiguous social realities, the ability to take multiple perspectives—
your own as well as those of others involved—is emphasized. “If a kid
is mad because he saw his girlfriend talking with another guy,” says
one of the New Haven teachers, “he’d be encouraged to consider what
might be going on from their point of view, too, rather than just
plunge into a confrontation.”
EMOTIONAL LITERACY AS PREVENTION
Some of the most effective programs in emotional literacy were
developed as a response to a specific problem, notably violence. One
of the fastest-growing of these prevention-inspired emotional literacy
courses is the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, in several | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f297232a6229-1 | courses is the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, in several
hundred New York City public schools and schools across the country.
The conflict-resolution course focuses on how to settle schoolyard
arguments that can escalate into incidents like the hallway shooting of
Ian Moore and Tyrone Sinkler by their classmate at Jefferson High
School.
Linda Lantieri, the founder of the Resolving Conflict Creatively
Program and director of the Manhattan-based national center for the
approach, sees it as having a mission far beyond just preventing
fights. She says, “The program shows students that they have many
choices for dealing with conflict besides passivity or aggression. We
show them the futility of violence while replacing it with concrete
skills. Kids learn to stand up for their rights without resorting to
violence. These are lifelong skills, not just for those most prone to
violence.”
10
In one exercise, students think of a single realistic step, no matter
how small, that might have helped settle some conflict they have had.
In another students enact a scene in which a big sister trying to do her
homework gets fed up with her younger sister’s loud rap tape. In | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
805fa54e0a02-0 | frustration the older sister turns off the tape despite the younger one’s
protests. The class brainstorms ways they might work out the problem
that would satisfy both sisters.
One key to the success of the conflict-resolution program is
extending it beyond the classroom to the playground and cafeteria,
where tempers are more likely to explode. To that end, some students
are trained as mediators, a role that can begin in the latter years of
elementary school. When tension erupts, students can seek out a
mediator to help them settle it. The schoolyard mediators learn to
handle fights, taunts and threats, interracial incidents, and the other
potentially incendiary incidents of school life.
The mediators learn to phrase their statements in ways that make
both parties feel the mediator is impartial. Their tactics include sitting
down with those involved and getting them to listen to the other
person without interruptions or insults. They have each party calm
down and state their position, then have each paraphrase what’s been
said so it’s clear they’ve really heard. Then they all try to think of
solutions that both sides can live with; the settlements are often in the
form of a signed agreement.
Beyond the mediation of a given dispute, the program teaches | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
805fa54e0a02-1 | Beyond the mediation of a given dispute, the program teaches
students to think differently about disagreements in the first place. As
Angel Perez, trained as a mediator while in grade school, put it, the
program “changed my way of thinking. I used to think, hey, if
somebody picks on me, if somebody does something to me, the only
thing was to fight, do something to get back at them. Since I had this
program, I’ve had a more positive way of thinking. If something’s
done negative to me, I don’t try to do the negative thing back—I try
to solve the problem.” And he has found himself spreading the
approach in his community.
While the focus of Resolving Conflict Creatively is on preventing
violence, Lantieri sees it as having a wider mission. Her view is that
the skills needed to
head off violence cannot be separated from the
full spectrum of emotional competence—that, for example, knowing
what you are feeling or how to handle impulse or grief is as important
for violence prevention as is managing anger. Much of the training
has to do with emotional basics such as recognizing an expanded
range of feelings and being able to put names to them, and
empathizing. When she describes the evaluation results of her | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
805fa54e0a02-2 | empathizing. When she describes the evaluation results of her
program’s effects, Lantieri points with as much pride to the increase in
“caring among the kids” as to the drops in fights, put-downs, and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
266267ee5fb7-0 | name-calling.
A similar convergence on emotional literacy occurred with a
consortium of psychologists trying to find ways to help youngsters on
a trajectory toward a life marked by crime and violence. Dozens of
studies of such boys—as we saw in
Chapter 15
—yielded a clear sense
of the path most take, starting from impulsiveness and a quickness to
anger in their earliest school years, through becoming social rejects by
the end of grade school, to bonding with a circle of others like
themselves and beginning crime sprees in the middle-school years. By
early adulthood, a large portion of these boys have acquired police
records and a readiness for violence.
When it came to designing interventions that might help such boys
get off this road to violence and crime, the result was, once again, an
emotional-literacy program.
11
One of these, developed by Carol
Kusche along with Mark Greenberg at the University of Washington, is
the PATHS curriculum (PATHS is the acronym for Promoting
Alternative Thinking Strategies). While those at risk for a trajectory
toward crime and violence are most in need of these lessons, the
course is given to all those in a class, avoiding any stigmatizing of a
more troubled subgroup. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
266267ee5fb7-1 | more troubled subgroup.
Still, the lessons are useful for all children. These include, for
example, learning in the earliest school years to control their
impulses; lacking this ability, children have special trouble paying
attention to what is being taught and so fall behind in their learning
and grades. Another is recognizing their feelings; the PATHS
curriculum has fifty lessons on different emotions, teaching the most
basic, such as happiness and anger, to the youngest children, and later
touching on more complicated feelings such as jealousy, pride, and
guilt. The emotional-awareness lessons include how to monitor what
they and those around them are feeling, and—most important for
those prone to aggression—how to recognize when someone is
actually hostile, as opposed to when the attribution of hostility comes
from oneself.
One of the most important lessons, of course, is anger management.
The basic premise children learn about anger (and all other emotions
as well) is
that “all feelings are okay to have,” but some reactions are
okay and others not. Here one of the tools for teaching self-control is
the same “stoplight” exercise used in the New Haven course. Other
units help children with their friendships, a counter to the social | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
266267ee5fb7-2 | units help children with their friendships, a counter to the social
rejections that can help propel a child toward delinquency. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
960876217152-0 | RETHINKING SCHOOLS: TEACHING BY BEING, COMMUNITIES
THAT CARE
As family life no longer offers growing numbers of children a sure
footing in life, schools are left as the one place communities can turn
to for correctives to children’s deficiencies in emotional and social
competence. That is not to say that schools alone can stand in for all
the social institutions that too often are in or nearing collapse. But
since virtually every child goes to school (at least at the outset), it
offers a place to reach children with basic lessons for living that they
may never get otherwise. Emotional literacy implies an expanded
mandate for schools, taking up the slack for failing families in
socializing children. This daunting task requires two major changes:
that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in
the community become more involved with schools.
Whether or not there is a class explicitly devoted to emotional
literacy may matter far less than
how
these lessons are taught. There is
perhaps no subject where the quality of the teacher matters so much,
since how a teacher handles her class is in itself a model, a de facto
lesson in emotional competence—or the lack thereof. Whenever a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
960876217152-1 | lesson in emotional competence—or the lack thereof. Whenever a
teacher responds to one student, twenty or thirty others learn a lesson.
There is a self-selection in the kind of teacher who gravitates to
courses such as these, because not everyone is suited by temperament.
To begin with, teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings;
not every teacher is at ease doing so or wants to be. There is little or
nothing in the standard education of teachers that prepares them for
this kind of teaching. For these reasons, emotional literacy programs
typically give prospective teachers several weeks of special training in
the approach.
While many teachers may be reluctant at the outset to tackle a topic
that seems so foreign to their training and routines, there is evidence
that once they are willing to try it, most will be pleased rather than
put off. In the New Haven schools, when teachers first learned that
they would be trained to teach the new emotional literacy courses, 31
percent said they were
reluctant to do so. After a year of teaching the
courses, more than 90 percent said they were pleased by them, and
wanted to teach them again the following year. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
960876217152-2 | wanted to teach them again the following year.
AN EXPANDED MISSION FOR SCHOOLS | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3dc038dd1669-0 | Beyond teacher training, emotional literacy expands our vision of the
task of schools themselves, making them more explicitly society’s
agent for seeing that children learn these essential lessons for life—a
return to a classic role for education. This larger design requires, apart
from any specifics of curriculum, using opportunities in and out of
class to help students turn moments of personal crisis into lessons in
emotional competence. It also works best when the lessons at school
are coordinated with what goes on in children’s homes. Many
emotional literacy programs include special classes for parents to
teach them about what their children are learning, not just to
complement what is imparted at school, but to help parents who feel
the need to deal more effectively with their children’s emotional life.
That way, children get consistent messages about emotional
competence in all parts of their lives. In the New Haven schools, says
Tim Shriver, director of the Social Competence Program, “if kids get
into a beef in the cafeteria, they’ll be sent to a peer mediator, who sits
down with them and works through their conflict with the same
perspective-taking technique they learned in class. Coaches will use
the technique to handle conflicts on the playing field. We hold classes | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3dc038dd1669-1 | for parents in using these methods with kids at home.”
Such parallel lines of reinforcement of these emotional lessons—not
just in the classroom, but also on the playground; not just in the
school, but also in the home—is optimal. That means weaving the
school, the parents, and the community together more tightly. It
increases the likelihood that what children learned in emotional
literacy classes will not stay behind at school, but will be tested,
practiced, and sharpened in the actual challenges of life.
Another way in which this focus reshapes schools is in building a
campus culture that makes it a “caring community,” a place where
students feel respected, cared about, and bonded to classmates,
teachers, and the school itself.
12
For example, schools in areas such as
New Haven, where families are disintegrating at a high rate, offer a
range of programs that recruit caring people in the community to get
engaged with students whose home life is shaky at best. In the New
Haven schools, responsible adults volunteer as
mentors, regular
companions for students who are foundering and who have few, if
any, stable and nurturing adults in their home life.
In short, the optimal design of emotional literacy programs is to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3dc038dd1669-2 | In short, the optimal design of emotional literacy programs is to
begin early, be age-appropriate, run throughout the school years, and
intertwine efforts at school, at home, and in the community. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
57fca79460f2-0 | Even though much of this fits neatly into existing parts of the school
day, these programs are a major change in any curriculum. It would
be naive not to anticipate hurdles in getting such programs into
schools. Many parents may feel that the topic itself is too personal a
domain for the schools, that such things are best left to parents (an
argument that gains credibility to the extent that parents actually
do
address these topics—and is less convincing when they fail to).
Teachers may be reluctant to yield yet another part of the school day
to topics that seem so unrelated to the academic basics; some teachers
may be too uncomfortable with the topics to teach them, and all will
need special training to do so. Some children, too, will resist,
especially to the extent that these classes are out of synch with their
actual concerns, or feel like intrusive impositions on their privacy.
And then there is the dilemma of maintaining high quality, and
ensuring that slick education marketers do not peddle ineptly
designed emotional-competence programs that repeat the disasters of,
say, ill-conceived courses on drugs or teen pregnancy.
Given all this, why should we bother to try?
DOES EMOTIONAL LITERACY MAKE A DIFFERENCE? | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
57fca79460f2-1 | DOES EMOTIONAL LITERACY MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
It’s every teacher’s nightmare: one day Tim Shriver opened the local
paper to read that Lamont, one of his favorite former students, had
been shot nine times on a New Haven street, and was in critical
condition. “Lamont had been one of the school leaders, a huge—six
foot two—and hugely popular linebacker, always smiling,” recalls
Shriver. “Back then Lamont had enjoyed coming to a leadership club I
led, where we would toss around ideas in a problem-solving model
known as SOCS.”
The acronym is for Situation, Options, Consequence, Solutions—a
four-step method: say what the situation is and how it makes you feel;
think about your options for solving the problem and what their
consequences might be; pick a solution and execute it—a grown-up
version of the stoplight method. Lamont, Shriver added, loved
brainstorming imaginative but potentially effective ways to handle the
pressing dilemmas of high-school life, such as problems with
girlfriends and how to avoid fights.
But those few lessons seemed to have failed him after high school.
Drifting on the streets in a sea of poverty, drugs, and guns, Lamont at | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3349a94e5e94-0 | twenty-six lay in a hospital bed, shrouded in bandages, his body
riddled with bullet holes. Rushing to the hospital, Shriver found
Lamont barely able to talk, his mother and girlfriend huddled over
him. Seeing his former teacher, Lamont motioned him to the bedside,
and as Shriver leaned over to hear, whispered, “Shrive, when I get out
of here, I’m gonna use the SOCS method.”
Lamont went through Hillhouse High in the years before the social-
development course was given there. Would his life have turned out
differently had he benefited from such an education throughout his
school years, as children in New Haven public schools do now? The
signs point to a possible yes, though no one can ever say for sure.
As Tim Shriver put it, “One thing is clear: the proving ground for
social problem-solving is not just the classroom, but the cafeteria, the
streets, home.” Consider testimony from teachers in the New Haven
program. One recounts how a former student, still single, visited and
said that she almost certainly would have been an unwed mother by
now “if she hadn’t learned to stand up for her rights during our Social
Development classes.”
13 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3349a94e5e94-1 | Development classes.”
13
Another teacher recalls how a student’s
relationship with her mother was so poor that their talks continually
ended up as screaming matches; after the girl learned about calming
down and thinking before reacting, the mother told her teacher that
they could now talk without going “off the deep end.” At the Troup
school, a sixth grader passed a note to the teacher of her Social
Development class; her best friend, the note said, was pregnant, had
no one to talk to about what to do, and was planning suicide—but she
knew the teacher would care.
A revealing moment came when I was observing a seventh-grade
class in social development in the New Haven Schools, and the
teacher asked for “someone to tell me about a disagreement they’ve
had recently that ended in a good way.”
A plumpish twelve-year-old girl shot up her hand: “This girl was
supposed to be my friend and someone said she wanted to fight me.
They told me she was going to get me in a corner after school.”
But instead of confronting the other girl in anger, she applied an
approach encouraged in the class—finding out what is going on | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3349a94e5e94-2 | approach encouraged in the class—finding out what is going on
before jumping to conclusions: “So I went to the girl and I asked why
she said that stuff. And she said she never did. So we never had a
fight.”
The story seems innocuous enough. Except that the girl who tells
the tale had already been expelled from another school for fighting. In | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dadf567bb6b3-0 | the past she
attacked first, asked questions later—or not at all. For her
to engage a seeming adversary in a constructive way rather than
immediately wading into an angry confrontal is a small but real
victory.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the impact of such emotional
literacy classes are the data shared with me by the principal of this
twelve-year-old’s school. An unbendable rule there is that children
caught fighting are suspended. But as the emotional literacy classes
have been phased in over the years there has been a steady drop in
the number of suspensions. “Last year,” says the principal, “there were
106 suspensions. So far this year—we’re up to March–there have been
only 26.”
These are concrete benefits. But apart from such anecdotes of lives
bettered or saved, there is the empirical question of how much
emotional literacy classes really matter to those who go through them.
The data suggest that although such courses do not change anyone
overnight, as children advance through the curriculum from grade to
grade, there are discernible improvements in the tone of a school and
the outlook—and level of emotional competence—of the girls and
boys who take them. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dadf567bb6b3-1 | boys who take them.
There have been a handful of objective evaluations, the best of
which compare students in these courses with equivalent students not
taking them, with independent observers rating the children’s
behavior. Another method is to track changes in the same students
before and after the courses based on objective measures of their
behavior, such as the number of schoolyard fights or suspensions.
Pooling such assessments reveals a widespread benefit for children’s
emotional and social competence, for their behavior in and out of the
classroom, and for their ability to learn (see
Appendix F
for details):
E
MOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS
• Improvement in recognizing and naming own emotions
• Better able to understand the causes of feelings
• Recognizing the difference between feelings and actions
M
ANAGING EMOTIONS
• Better frustration tolerance and anger management | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9c61b458d187-0 | • Fewer verbal put-downs, fights, and classroom disruptions
• Better able to express anger appropriately, without fighting
• Fewer suspensions and expulsions
• Less aggressive or self-destructive behavior
• More positive feelings about self, school, and family
• Better at handling stress
• Less loneliness and social anxiety
H
ARNESSING EMOTIONS PRODUCTIVELY
• More responsible
• Better able to focus on the task at hand and pay attention
• Less impulsive; more self-control
• Improved scores on achievement tests
E
MPATHY: READING EMOTIONS
• Better able to take another person’s perspective
• Improved empathy and sensitivity to others’ feelings
• Better at listening to others
H
ANDLING RELATIONSHIPS
• Increased ability to analyze and understand relationships
• Better at resolving conflicts and negotiating disagreements
• Better at solving problems in relationships
• More assertive and skilled at communicating
• More popular and outgoing; friendly and involved with peers
• More sought out by peers
• More concerned and considerate
• More “pro-social” and harmonious in groups
• More sharing, cooperation, and helpfulness
• More democratic in dealing with others
One item on this list demands special attention: emotional literacy | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9c61b458d187-1 | One item on this list demands special attention: emotional literacy
programs improve children’s
academic
achievement scores and school | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f3ef09469407-0 | performance. This is not an isolated finding; it recurs again and again
in such studies. In a time when too many children lack the capacity to
handle their upsets, to listen or focus, to rein in impulse, to feel
responsible for their work or care about learning, anything that will
buttress these skills will help in their education. In this sense,
emotional literacy enhances schools’ ability to teach. Even in a time of
back-to-basics and budget cuts, there is an argument to be made that
these programs help reverse a tide of educational decline and
strengthen schools in accomplishing their main mission, and so are
well worth the investment.
Beyond these educational advantages, the courses seem to help
children better fulfill their roles in life, becoming better friends,
students, sons and daughters—and in the future are more likely to be
better husbands and wives, workers and bosses, parents, and citizens.
While not every boy and girl will acquire these skills with equal
sureness, to the degree they do we are all the better for it. “A rising
tide lifts all boats,” as Tim Shriver put it. “It’s not just the kids with
problems, but all kids who can benefit from these skills; these are an
inoculation for life.” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f3ef09469407-1 | inoculation for life.”
CHARACTER, MORALITY, AMD THE ARTS Of DEMOCRACY
There is an old-fashioned word for the body of skills that emotional
intelligence represents:
character
. Character, writes Amitai Etzioni, the
George Washington University social theorist, is “the psychological
muscle that moral conduct requires.”
14
And philosopher John Dewey
saw that a moral education is most potent when lessons are taught to
children in the course of real events, not just as abstract lessons—the
mode of emotional literacy.
15
If character development is a foundation of democratic societies,
consider some of the ways emotional intelligence buttresses this
foundation. The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous
life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-
control. A related keystone of character is being able to motivate and
guide oneself, whether in doing homework, finishing a job, or getting
up in the morning. And, as we have seen, the ability to defer
gratification and to control and channel one’s urges to act is a basic
emotional skill, one that in a former day was called will. “We need to
be in control of ourselves—our appetites, our passions—to do right by | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d4e88793d05b-0 | others,” notes Thomas Lickona, writing about character education.
16
“It takes will to keep emotion under the control of reason.”
Being able to put aside one’s self-centered focus and impulses has
social benefits: it opens the way to empathy, to real listening, to
taking another person’s perspective. Empathy, as we have seen, leads
to caring, altruism, and compassion. Seeing things from another’s
perspective breaks down biased stereotypes, and so breeds tolerance
and acceptance of differences. These capacities are ever more called
on in our increasingly pluralistic society, allowing people to live
together in mutual respect and creating the possibility of productive
public discourse. These are basic arts of democracy.
17
Schools, notes Etzioni, have a central role in cultivating character
by
inculcating self-discipline and empathy, which in turn enable true
commitment to civic and moral values.
18
In doing so, it is not enough
to lecture children about values: they need to practice them, which
happens as children build the essential emotional and social skills. In
this sense, emotional literacy goes hand in hand with education for
character, for moral development, and for citizenship.
A LAST WORD | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d4e88793d05b-1 | A LAST WORD
As I complete this book some troubling newspaper items catch my
eye. One announces that guns have become the number-one cause of
death in America, edging out auto accidents. The second says that last
year murder rates rose by 3 percent.
19
Particularly disturbing is the
prediction in that second article, by a criminologist, that we are in a
lull before a “crime storm” to come in the next decade. The reason he
gives is that murders by teenagers as young as fourteen and fifteen are
on the rise, and that age group represents the crest of a mini baby
boom. In the next decade this group will become eighteen- to twenty-
four-year-olds, the age at which violent crimes peak in the course of a
criminal career. The harbingers are on the horizon: A third article says
that in the four years between 1988 and 1992 Justice Department
figures show a 68 percent jump in the number of juveniles charged
with murder, aggravated assault, robbery, and forcible rape, with
aggravated assault alone up 80 percent.
20
These teenagers are the first generation to have not just guns but
automatic weaponry easily available to them, just as their parents’ | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d4e88793d05b-2 | generation was the first to have wide access to drugs. The toting of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ea2f27f568aa-0 | guns by teenagers means that disagreements that in a former day
would have led to fistfights can readily lead to shootings instead. And,
as another expert points out, these teenagers “just aren’t very good at
avoiding disputes.”
One reason they are so poor at this basic life skill, of course, is that
as a society we have not bothered to make sure every child is taught
the essentials of handling anger or resolving conflicts positively—nor
have we bothered to teach empathy, impulse control, or any of the
other fundamentals of emotional competence. By leaving the
emotional lessons children learn to chance, we risk largely wasting
the window of opportunity presented by the slow maturation of the
brain to help children cultivate a healthy emotional repertoire.
Despite high interest in emotional literacy among some educators,
these
courses are as yet rare; most teachers, principals, and parents
simply do not know they exist. The best models are largely outside the
education mainstream, in a handful of private schools and a few
hundred public schools. Of course no program, including this one, is
an answer to every problem. But given the crises we find ourselves | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ea2f27f568aa-1 | and our children facing, and given the quantum of hope held out by
courses in emotional literacy, we must ask ourselves: Shouldn’t we be
teaching these most essential skills for life to every child—now more
than ever?
And if not now, when?
*
For more information on emotional literacy courses: The Collaborative for the Advancement
of Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL, Department of Psychology (M/C 285), University
of Illinois at Chicago, 1007 West Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60606-7137. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a62d60c544d3-0 | APPENDIX A
What Is Emotion?
A word about what I refer to under the rubric
emotion
, a term whose
precise meaning psychologists and philosophers have quibbled over
for more than a century. In its most literal sense, the
Oxford English
Dictionary
defines
emotion
as “any agitation or disturbance of mind,
feeling, passion; any vehement or excited mental state.” I take
emotion
to refer to a feeling and its distinctive thoughts, psychological and
biological states, and range of propensities to act. There are hundreds
of emotions, along with their blends, variations, mutations, and
nuances. Indeed, there are many more subtleties of emotion than we
have words for.
Researchers continue to argue over precisely which emotions can be
considered primary—the blue, red, and yellow of feeling from which
all blends come—or even if there are such primary emotions at all.
Some theorists propose basic families, though not all agree on them.
The main candidates and some of the members of their families:
•
Anger:
fury, outrage, resentment, wrath, exasperation, indignation,
vexation, acrimony, animosity, annoyance, irritability, hostility, and, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a62d60c544d3-1 | perhaps at the extreme, pathological hatred and violence
•
Sadness:
grief, sorrow, cheerlessness, gloom, melancholy, self-pity,
loneliness, dejection, despair, and, when pathological, severe
depression
•
Fear:
anxiety, apprehension, nervousness, concern, consternation,
misgiving, wariness, qualm, edginess, dread, fright, terror; as a
psychopathology, phobia and panic
•
Enjoyment:
happiness, joy, relief, contentment, bliss, delight,
amusement, pride, sensual pleasure, thrill, rapture, gratification,
satisfaction, euphoria, whimsy, ecstasy, and at the far edge, mania
•
Love:
acceptance, friendliness, trust, kindness, affinity, devotion,
adoration, infatuation,
agape
•
Surprise:
shock, astonishment, amazement, wonder
•
Disgust:
contempt, disdain, scorn, abhorrence, aversion, distaste, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dd3c54cc2536-0 | revulsion
•
Shame:
guilt, embarrassment, chagrin, remorse, humiliation,
regret, mortification, and contrition
To be sure, this list does not resolve every question about how to
categorize emotion. For example, what about blends such as jealousy,
a variant of anger that also melds sadness and fear? And what of the
virtues, such as hope and faith, courage and forgiveness, certainty and
equanimity? Or some of the classic vices, feelings such as doubt,
complacency, sloth, and torpor—or boredom? There are no clear
answers; the scientific debate on how to classify emotions continues.
The argument for there being a handful of core emotions hinges to
some extent on the discovery by Paul Ekman, at the University of
California at San Francisco, that specific facial expressions for four of
them (fear, anger, sadness, enjoyment) are recognized by people in
cultures around the world, including preliterate peoples presumably
untainted by exposure to cinema or television—suggesting their
universality. Ekman showed facial photos portraying expressions with
technical precision to people in cultures as remote as the Fore of New
Guinea, an isolated Stone Age tribe in the remote highlands, and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dd3c54cc2536-1 | found people everywhere recognized the same basic emotions. This
universality of facial expressions for emotion was probably first noted
by Darwin, who saw it as evidence the forces of evolution had
stamped these signals in our central nervous system.
In seeking basic principles, I follow Ekman and others in thinking of
emotions in terms of families or dimensions, taking the main families
—anger, sadness, fear, enjoyment, love, shame, and so on—as cases in
point for the endless nuances of our emotional life. Each of these
families has a basic emotional nucleus at its core, with its relatives
rippling out from there in countless mutations. In the outer ripples are
moods
, which, technically speaking, are more muted and last far
longer than an emotion (while it’s relatively rare to be in the full heat
of anger all day, for example, it is not that rare to be in a grumpy,
irritable mood, in which shorter bouts of anger are easily triggered).
Beyond moods are
temperaments
, the readiness to evoke a given
emotion or mood that makes people melancholy, timid, or cheery.
And still beyond such emotional dispositions are the outright
disorders
of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
Subsets and Splits