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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.
emotional intelligence, which include self-control, zeal
and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself.
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.
the emotional lessons we learn as children at home and at school shape the emotional circuits, making us more adept—or inept—at the basics of emotional intelligence.
the problem is not with emotionality, but with the appropriateness of emotion and its expression.
The very name Homo sapiens, the thinking species, is misleading in light of the new appreciation and vision of the place of emotions in our lives that science now offers. As we all know from experience, when it comes to shaping our decisions and our actions, feeling counts every bit as much—and often more—than thought.
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,”
The most ancient root of our emotional life is in the sense of smell, or, more precisely, in the olfactory lobe,
Every living entity, be it nutritious, poisonous, sexual partner, predator or prey, has a distinctive molecular signature that can be carried in the wind.
This new addition to the brain allowed the addition of nuance to emotional life. Take love.
Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.
One reason we can be so baffled by our emotional outbursts, then, is that they often date from a time early in our lives when things were bewildering and we did not yet have words for comprehending events. We may have the chaotic feelings, but not the words for the memories that formed them.
Emotional hijackings presumably involve two dynamics: triggering of the amygdala and a failure to activate the neocortical processes that usually keep emotional response in balance—or
At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces.
emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.
People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from whom to marry to what job to take.
a parallel stream of consciousness that is “meta”: hovering above or beside the main flow, aware of what is happening rather than being immersed and lost in it.
It is the difference between, for example, being murderously enraged at someone and having the self-reflexive thought “This is anger I’m feeling” even as you are enraged.
a phenomenon known in psychiatry as somaticizing, mistaking an emotional ache for a physical one (and different from a psychosomatic disease, in which emotional problems cause genuine medical ones).
having no words for feelings means not making the feelings your own.
The Romans and the early Christian church called it temperantia, temperance, the restraining of emotional excess. The goal is balance, not emotional suppression: every feeling has its value and significance.
But, as Aristotle observed, what is wanted is appropriate emotion, feeling proportionate to circumstance.
It is not that people need to avoid unpleasant feelings to feel content, but rather that stormy feelings not go unchecked, displacing all pleasant moods.
The art of soothing ourselves is a fundamental life skill;
Anger builds on anger;
Distraction, Zillmann finds, is a highly powerful mood-altering device, for a simple reason: It’s hard to stay angry when we’re having a pleasant time.
Tice found that ventilating anger is one of the worst ways to cool down: outbursts of rage typically pump up the emotional brain’s arousal, leaving people feeling more angry, not less.
Worry is, in a sense, a rehearsal of what might go wrong and how to deal with it;
Is it very probable that the dreaded event will occur?
challenging it by contemplating a range of equally plausible points of view keeps the one worried thought from being naively taken as true.
one of the main determinants of whether a depressed mood will persist or lift is the degree to which people ruminate.
Aerobic exercise, Tice found, is one of the more effective tactics for lifting mild depression, as well as other bad moods. But the caveat here is that the mood-lifting benefits of exercise work best for the lazy, those who usually do not work out very much.
Common ways people soothed themselves when depressed ranged from taking hot baths or eating favorite foods, to listening to music or having sex.
Another effective depression-lifter is helping others in need.
The prefrontal cortex executes working memory—and, remember, is where feelings and emotions meet.
At age four, how children do on this test of delay of gratification is twice as powerful a predictor of what their SAT scores will be as is IQ at age four; IQ becomes a stronger predictor of SAT only after children learn to read.
The intellectual benefits of a good laugh are most striking when it comes to solving a problem that demands a creative solution.
Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry:
