Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 22

Emotional intelligence & the obesity epidemic

Q: I am a Doctoral student working on a dissertation currently titled "A Mixed-Methods Study of the Correlation and Educator Perceptions among a Middle School Student's Body Mass Index and Academics, Attendance, and Behavior." While interviewing educators, they expressed their concern about obesity prevention and intervention not only occurring in the schools, but society. Another concern was that most people do not recognize themselves or someone else as being overweight or obese, when in fact they are. I instantly thought about ecological intelligence and wondered how you think society should respond to this epidemic. Any thoughts that you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

A:  Emotional intelligence abilities can help tackle obesity in certain ways.  For the overweight individual, the self-mastery abilities – self-awareness and self-regulation – work hand in hand.  Here mindfulness, an application of self-awareness, can help a person tune in to their thoughts and feelings while eating, and use the body's signals for satiety to know when to stop – an act of self-regulation.

At the social level, the ecological intelligence framework of radical transparency about the things we buy could help, too. One of the main negative impacts of the foods we eat – at least processed foods – are the adverse health consequences, with obesity and the related epidemics of heart disease and diabetes the number one specimen.  So just as I proposed making the precise ecological impacts of a product as fully transparent as its prices, I'd encourage doing that with its health impacts, too. When Hannaford Brothers, a supermarket chain in the northeast, had nutritionists rate the value of the foods they sold on a three-star to no-star scale (three is best), market share shifted toward the three star foods and away from no-star. Not a single processed food got any stars – mainly because of too much salt and fat.  If all foods – including fast foods — were marked in this simple way (even the nutrition labels we have now are too complex), enough shoppers will switch to better choices. That means the people who manage those brands will have to change what's in them in order to keep our business. And giving people better choices will also help them keep their weight down.

Key EI topics & content for youth programs

Q: I have read a lot about emotional intelligence and now I am designing a program for youth which will help them to explore, understand and manage their emotions positively. What are the key topics and core content that should be addressed in the program?

A: The best research on what should go into an emotional intelligence program for young people can be found at www.casel.org – the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning.  CASEL has organized this research on child development and education into a year-by-year curriculum that details what children need to learn at each age in order to develop the most healthy social and emotional abilities.  That curriculum can be found at http://casel.org/publications/illinois-sel-standards/

Emotional intelligence & language acquisition

Q: Can a person who has a high EQ learn a second language easier and faster or not?

A: There is no necessary relationship between emotional intelligence and a cognitive ability like language learning. As I detailed in The Brain And Emotional Intelligence, the neural circuits that govern self-management and relationship skills – the two main parts of EI – are independent of the areas for verbal and other cognitive capabilities.

On the other hand, it may depend on how you are learning the language. The one way in which EI might facilitate language learning is if you go to that culture and learn the language by living there. The more naturally occurring opportunities you have to practice, the quicker your learning will be. And EI should make it easier for you to cultivate the ongoing relationships with people who can help you learn.

Emotional intelligence & language aquisition

Q: Can a person who has a high EQ learn a second language easier and faster or not?

A: There is no necessary relationship between emotional intelligence and a cognitive ability like language learning. As I detailed in The Brain And Emotional Intelligence, the neural circuits that govern self-management and relationship skills – the two main parts of EI – are independent of the areas for verbal and other cognitive capabilities.

On the other hand, it may depend on how you are learning the language. The one way in which EI might facilitate language learning is if you go to that culture and learn the language by living there. The more naturally occurring opportunities you have to practice, the quicker your learning will be. And EI should make it easier for you to cultivate the ongoing relationships with people who can help you learn.

My mother, Fay Goleman

Fay Goleman (1910-2010)

My mother witnessed remarkable social changes in her 99 years of life and, in her own small way, contributed to them. She was born in 1910 in Chicago to immigrant parents. Her father was from a part of Russia now called Belarus; once in the U.S. he became a labor organizer in the textile industry and later a factory manager. Fay's mother, Emma Levinson Weinberg, was orphaned as a child and raised by cousins. Emma, who had been taught to read by her father before he died, was just a teenager when she risked her life by gathering groups of Russian peasants in secluded spots to read tracts urging a peasant's revolt against he Czar, a capital crime. Emma fled Russia and came to America.

Fay grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual and political debate, in a Chicago neighborhood brimming with Russian émigré "intelligentsia." As a girl one of her role models was Jane Addams, who had co-founded Hull House, a social welfare center in Chicago that was an early model for what became a movement of "settlement houses" that offered social services to destitute immigrant families.

After completing her undergraduate education at the University of Chicago, Fay earned a Masters in Social Work from Smith College. In 1932 she married my father Irving, who was an impoverished graduate student at Yale. While he pursued his graduate work in philology, Fay was the social secretary to the wife of Yale president James Rowland Angell.

During those years, Fay also worked with the movement founded by Margaret Sanger (which later became Planned Parenthood). In a move that echoed her own mother's clandestine meetings in the Russian forests, Fay was the social worker in groups that held secret classes for women in family planning, which were illegal at the time.

In 1935 my parents drove in a model A Ford with another couple to California, a trip that took several weeks in those days. They both joined the faculty at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. Fay taught at UOP for four decades in the Sociology and Education departments, and founded the clinical services program.

I can remember as a child in the 1950s that I was the only kid I knew who had not just a working Dad, but also a Mom who worked full time (hard to believe in a day when it's now a minority of couples where both parent don't work). With her childhood memories of the suffragette movement successfully winning women the right to vote in 1919, Fay was a lifelong pioneer in the struggle for equal rights for women. Throughout her career she very often was the "first woman to…" starting with being the editor of her high school yearbook. In 1972 she became the first Chair of the Affirmative Action Committee at UOP, and received the University's Susan B. Anthony Award in 1989.

In the years when I was going to Sunday School in a dilapidated building next to the temple we attended, Fay saw that it was a fire trap. So she wrote a stinging letter to the board members, and hand-delivered a copy to all 18 at their homes. That sparked a building campaign that resulted in a new temple and Sunday school – a copy of her letter is on display in its lobby to this day.

Always active in community concerns, I have endless childhood memories of Fay trotting off to this meeting or that: As a board member of the Stockton Community council, she helped initiate the founding of the Visiting Nurse Association, a senior citizens center, a center for the handicapped, services to the developmentally disabled, and the building of the Stockton Public Library. At one time or another she was president of the San Joaquin County Community Council, and on the boards of the San Joaquin County Public Welfare association, the Parent-Teacher Association Foundation, and our temple. Then there were her trips to Sacramento as a member of the governor's Advisory Committees on Mental Health and on Children and Youth. When there was a riot in a girl's prison, Fay was on the committee that investigated and wrote the report that recommended reforms. My Mom was always on the go; she took her civic responsibility very seriously.

Every Sunday Fay had a phone call with her brother, Alvin Weinberg, a physicist. He was the Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 25 years. An early advocate of alternative energy, Alvin eventually was fired by a large corporation that took over the lab with plans to go into the nuclear energy business. Alvin lost his position because he vocally and continually warned the industry against letting nuclear power plants be run by private companies who might trade off safety for profits, and that the industry must find a safe way to store nuclear waste. Fay and Alvin spoke weekly for more than half a century, until his death at 91 in 2006.

Fay passed away a few months short of her 100th birthday, in the same bedroom where my father had died from cancer almost a half century before.  When my sisters and I closed up the house, we went through Fay and Irving's papers, and sorted out their large, eclectic library.  As we remembered moments from our childhood, I felt a deep gratitude to both my parents for having raised us in a stew of love, social conscience, a spirit of service, and endless intellectual curiosity.

Silence and the "A-ha!" moment

Q: Your video on the "A-ha!" moment is so obviously true and is certainly within my experience. You mentioned research that supports the proposition that silence is necessary in order for unconscious processing to do its work. Are you able to point me in the direction of this research?

A: As I've written in my book The Brain and Emotional Intelligence, new research has given us a fresh window on how to foster creative insights. It's not exactly silence that fosters the unconscious processing involved in creativity, but rather sustained focus – and that sometimes takes silence. Noise can distract, for sure (but it depends:  I remember learning how to concentrate on getting an article done on deadline when I worked in a busy newsroom at the New York Times).  The best research on this is by Teresa Amabile, who asked thousands of "knowledge workers"— whose jobs require they come up with innovative insights – to keep a daily diary recording their best moments and the conditions that helped or hindered their creative output.  I've blogged about her work here.

Empathy & genetics

Q: How strong is the genetic neural connection related to empathy? Do you see this as a Darwinian result of more than ten thousand years of organized warfare? Also, if there is a strong genetic component to the neural correlates of empathy, do you see those with an impediment to the experience of empathy as particularly challenged to be able to develop feelings of compassion and loving kindness. Mary Douglas developed a theory based on group and grid where the group dimension had individualism at one end and communitarian sympathies at the other. Do you think this facet of human behavior is related to empathy (or the lack thereof)?

A: Emotional intelligence abilities are largely learned and learnable, though there is certainly a generic component. So with empathy, I would assume that this core talent for rapport and cooperation has been favored in evolution – far more for its power in strengthening bonds in families and groups than in warfare over the several hundred thousand years of human evolution.  We also know that practicing lovingkindness enhances the functioning of the underlying brain  circuits, though I have yet to see data on empathy itself. And people in collectivist cultures, where the self is identified with a core group like your family or clan, seem to be especially attuned, compared to those from individualist cultures.

EI as a predictor of success

Q:  I've been told that EI is twice a predictor of academic, business or personal success than IQ or technical skill. Are there any percentages that bear out on this that I can share with fellow colleagues?

A: No one can say with certainty at this point how IQ compares to EI as predictors of various kinds of success. That answer awaits a longitudinal study that follows a large number of people from childhood to adulthood. On the other hand, I have proposed the following relationship between EI, IQ, and success.  First, IQ is by far the best predictor of what job or profession you can attain – you need a higher IQ to handle the complexities of nursing, teaching, accounting, software programming, and dozens of other cognitively demanding jobs.  So, in general, IQ is the best predictor of academic and business success.

But once people are in a given profession – executives, lawyers, etc – then a "floor effect" for IQ means that they are competing with people who are about as smart as they are. So within a profession, emotional intelligence – how people manage themselves and their relationships – becomes a more powerful factor in who will emerge as most successful, or as a leader.  And when it comes to success in personal life, I would bet EI matters more than IQ.  But the data is not yet in.

Podcast: New Insights on Emotional Intelligence

In this podcast for Management Consulting News, Mike McLaughlin talks with Daniel Goleman about his recent research on the ways brain science suggests we use our minds to be creative when we need to be, build rapport more easily, and stay focused and productive for longer periods of time. Goleman's new findings are included in his latest eBook, The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights. He shares some of those insights in this podcast. Listen to it here: http://podcast.mwmclaughlin.com/podcasts/daniel-goleman/.

The ECI 360

Q: My dissertation topic requires that I survey my participants regarding emotional intelligence. I would like to know if it's possible to use the ECI 360 test (or part of it).

A:  The emotional intelligence assessment that I co-designed with Richard Boyatzis and the HayGroup is the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory, or ESCI-360. An earlier version was called the ECI-360; a version called the ECI-U is designed for college students. The ESCI-360 was designed for use in EI-based leadership development programs, but it and the ECI-U is also available at no charge for use in academic research. However, you must get approval from Ginny.Flynn@HayGroup.com.