Emotional Intelligence

by Daniel Goleman

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Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy. ARISTOTLE, The Nichomachean Ethics

Psychological science knew little or nothing of the mechanics of emotion.

But the news simply reflects back to us on a larger scale a creeping sense of emotions out of control in our own lives and in those of the people around us.

The last decade has seen a steady drumroll of reports like these, portraying an uptick in emotional ineptitude, desperation, and recklessness in our families, our communities, and our collective lives.

The last decade, despite its bad news, has also seen an unparalleled burst of scientific studies of emotion.

For one, impulse is the medium of emotion; the seed of all impulse is a feeling bursting to express itself in action. Those who are at the mercy of impulse—who lack self-control—suffer a moral deficiency: The ability to control impulse is the base of will and character.

By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another’s need or despair, there is no caring. And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.

Understanding the interplay of brain structures that rule our moments of rage and fear—or passion and joy—reveals much about how we learn the emotional habits that can undermine our best intentions, as well as what we can do to subdue our more destructive or self-defeating emotional impulses.

Most important, the neurological data suggest a window of opportunity for shaping our children’s emotional habits.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

This means that childhood and adolescence are critical windows of opportunity for setting down the essential emotional habits that will govern our lives.

Perhaps the most disturbing single piece of data in this book comes from a massive survey of parents and teachers and shows a worldwide trend for the present generation of children to be more troubled emotionally than the last: more lonely and depressed, more angry and unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and aggressive.

At present we leave the emotional education of our children to chance, with ever more disastrous results.

One solution is a new vision of what schools can do to educate the whole student, bringing together mind and heart in the classroom.

I can foresee a day when education will routinely include inculcating essential human competencies such as self-awareness, self-control, and empathy, and the arts of listening, resolving conflicts, and cooperation.

Ponder the last moments of Gary and Mary Jane Chauncey,

Seen from the perspective of evolutionary biologists, such parental self-sacrifice is in the service of “reproductive success” in passing on one’s genes to future generations. But from the perspective of a parent making a desperate decision in a moment of crisis, it is about nothing other than love.

Sociobiologists point to the preeminence of heart over head at such crucial moments when they conjecture about why evolution has given emotion such a central role in the human psyche.

Our emotions, they say, guide us in facing predicaments and tasks too important to leave to intellect alone—danger, painful loss, persisting toward a goal despite frustrations, bonding with a mate, building a family. Each emotion offers a distinctive readiness to act; each points us in a direction that has worked well to handle the recurring challenges of human life.

As these eternal situations were repeated and repeated over our evolutionary history, the survival value of our emotional repertoire was attested to by its becoming imprinted in our nerves ...

A view of human nature that ignores the power of emotions is ...

Matilda Crabtree died twelve hours later.5

Indeed, the first laws and proclamations of ethics—the Code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments of the Hebrews, the Edicts of Emperor Ashoka—can be read as attempts to harness, subdue, and domesticate emotional life.

This given of human nature arises from the basic architecture of mental life. In terms of biological design for the basic neural circuitry of emotion, what we are born with is what worked best for the last 50,000 human generations, not the last 500 generations—and certainly not the last five. The slow, deliberate forces of evolution that have shaped our emotions have done their work over the course of a million years; the last 10,000 years—despite having witnessed the rapid rise of human civilization and the explosion of the human population from five million to five billion—have left little imprint on our biological templates for emotional life.

In short, we too often confront postmodern dilemmas with an emotional repertoire tailored to the urgencies of the Pleistocene. That predicament is at the heart of my subject.

One early spring day I was driving along a highway over a mountain pass in Colorado,

All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us. The very root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb “to move,” plus the prefix “e-” to connote “move away,” suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit in every emotion.

With anger

With fear

happiness

Love, tender feelings, and sexual satisfaction

The lifting of the eyebrows in surprise

Around the world an expression of disgust looks the same,

A main function for sadness

While in the ancient past a hair-trigger anger may have offered a crucial edge for survival, the availability of automatic weaponry to thirteen-year-olds has made it too often a disastrous reaction.8

A friend was telling me about her divorce, a painful separation.

That moment of teary eyes could easily pass unnoted.

One is an act of the emotional mind, the other of the rational mind. In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.

The emotional/rational dichotomy approximates the folk distinction between “heart” and “head”; knowing something is right “in your heart” is a different order of conviction—somehow a deeper kind of certainty—than thinking so with your rational mind.

Jupiter has bestowed far more passion than reason—you could calculate the ratio as 24 to one. He set up two raging tyrants in opposition to Reason’s solitary power: anger and lust. How far Reason can prevail against the combined forces of these two the common life of man makes quite clear. Reason does the only thing she can and shouts herself hoarse, repeating formulas of virtue, while the other two bid her go hang herself, and are increasingly noisy and offensive, until at last their Ruler is exhausted, gives up, and surrenders.

Over millions of years of evolution, the brain has grown from the bottom up, with its higher centers developing as elaborations of lower, more ancient parts. (The growth of the brain in the human embryo roughly retraces this evolutionary course.)

The fact that the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.

Such emotional explosions are neural hijackings.

At those moments, evidence suggests, a center in the limbic brain proclaims an emergency, recruiting the rest of the brain to its urgent agenda.

The hippocampus and the amygdala were the two key parts of the primitive “nose brain” that, in evolution, gave rise to the cortex and then the neocortex. To this day these limbic structures do much or most of the brain’s learning and remembering; the amygdala is the specialist for emotional matters.

This puts the amygdala in a powerful post in mental life, something like a psychological sentinel, challenging every situation, every perception, with but one kind of question in mind, the most primitive: “Is this something I hate? That hurts me? Something I fear?” If so—if the moment at hand somehow draws a “Yes”—the amygdala reacts instantaneously, like a neural tripwire, telegraphing a message of crisis to all parts of the brain.

“Some emotional reactions and emotional memories can be formed without any conscious, cognitive participation at all.” The amygdala can house memories and response repertoires that we enact without quite realizing why we do so because the shortcut from thalamus to amygdala completely bypasses the neocortex.