It's been standard practice in Cognitive-Behavioral therapy to teach clients that our thoughts trigger our emotions. Thus with training and practice a client can learn to change feelings by changing thoughts. While that is generally true, what CBT specialists sometimes miss is that some feelings actually control our thinking, often in ways that are beyond our awareness.
When we are young, before the age of about 8, much of what we learn, we learn in emotional memory. Indeed, before the age of five, most people remember very little about that time of life. That's because emotional memory records no clear recollection of events, no words, only emotions and the sort of trigger that set it off. Emotional memories might be accompanied by verbal memory, but the connection is far from guaranteed and the trigger for the emotional memory is MUCH broader than the finely tuned and coolly calculated thought based trigger.Thus when a child younger than 5 years touches a hot stove, she will remember that a stove hurts and may stay away until she understands in detail how a stove works. Even then, she might be particularly cautious regardless of further learning until the emotional memory dims with repetition.
We continue to remember emotional memories throughout our lives whenever an experience has such an emotional impact, that our thoughts are impaired, our logic shutdown. Those emotional memories kick in when we become emotionally aroused in a similar situation. Those reactions are tough to change. It generally doesn't work to rationally decide you'll never react emotionally again. When strong primal emotions erupt, they are so compelling, that many think they lose control of their behavior. The angry strike out verbally or physically and the fearful cower or run.
The truth is that we can learn to be more aware of our feelings and stop ourselves from acting until we can muster some rationality to make a reasonable decision. The key here is what we believe. If we think we can't control our emotions, indeed we can't. If we believe we can stop ourselves and make a better choice, then we will.
Little did grandma know, the old advice to stop and count to ten has it's roots in brain physiology.
I'm going to try to write more short posts rather than work on a big paper for months before I post.
There is a lot of hype about Facebook causing depression citing research. Actually, if you look, you will find the research had nothing to do with Facebook.
It all started with this article writing on this research article where the author rather loosely used the term "Facebook depression". There is of course no such thing as Facebook depression. The author submits her disclaimer here.
All the more reason to read about research in the media with considerable skepticism. Here is a past article I wrote on the topic.
There is reason to be concerned about spending long hours doing anything, including Facebook and the Internet, that could contribute to the development of depression. The causes are much more complex.
Reference
O'Keeffe, G., Clarke-Pearson, K., & , . (2011). The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families PEDIATRICS, 127 (4), 800-804 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2011-0054
This is the fifth in a series of articles on Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth.
Probably all of us have asked our self from time to time if our thoughts, feelings, or behavior at any single moment is "normal". Actually, there are different answers for each one of these.
Normal behavior is, like it or not, defined by our legal, community (family, neighborhood, social group) and religious institutions. The law is enforced by our local police, and sanctioned by our courts. Religious values might be said to be collectively defined by our church going population and it's leadership. If we are observed behaving outside of legal boundaries, we may find ourselves in a court room facing a judge. If we stretch our community or religious values, we might be ostracized, and separated from the kind of support we have been reliant on through our life.
Our internal life, our thoughts and feelings, that which goes on within ourselves may be our last real privacy. And that is indeed fortunate. Our internal creativity is uncomfortably broad. We are capable of thinking and feeling most anything from time to time. Under provocation, we are capable of thinking about things we would never do. Angry enough, we may think of assault, even murder. Seeing a pretty woman, a married man might think about cheating on his wife, but never act on that thought. Shocked about a death in the family, our first thoughts may be directed at the inconvenience of disrupting out usual routine and our feelings might be closer to annoyed. Our thoughts and our feelings often contradict each other. In a real sense, we live a dual existence.
Duality
Our body speaks to us through our feelings. Messages are typically fast, automatic, effortless, associative, not available to reflection, and often emotionally charged. Messages are also governed by habit and are therefore difficult to control or modify without time and significant effort. Curiously, since the messages do not require conscious awareness, they do not cause or suffer much interference when combined with other tasks.
Our thoughts, however, are relatively slower, serial, effortful, more likely to be consciously monitored and deliberately controlled. Compared to feelings, thoughts are relatively flexible and thus change readily and can be directed by conscious or habitual rules. Because thoughts are effortful, they tend to disrupt each other. Thus monitoring mental operations for quality interferes with monitoring overt behavior. People who are occupied by a demanding mental activity are more likely to respond to another task by blurting out whatever comes to mind.
Intuitive judgments combine the function of feelings and thoughts. The perceptual system and intuitive about perceptions generate impressions of the attributes of objects. These impressions are neither voluntary nor verbally explicit. Judgments are always intentional and explicit even when they are not overtly expressed. Thus, thinking is involved in all judgments and can be reflected upon, whether they originate in impressions or in deliberate reasoning. Monitoring of intuitive judgments is normally quite lax and allows many to be expressed, including some that are erroneous (Kahneman, 2003).
We perceive reality by these two interactive, parallel processing systems.
"The rational system , a relative newcomer on the evolutionary scene, is a deliberative, verbally mediated, primarily conscious analytical system that functions by a person's understanding of conventionally established rules of logic and evidence. The experiential system, which is considered to be shared by all higher order organisms (although more complex in humans), has a much longer evolutionary history, operates in an automatic, holistic, associationistic manner, is intimately associated with the experience of affect, represents events in the form of concrete exemplars and schemas inductively derived from emotionally significant past experiences, and is able to generalize and to construct relatively complex models for organizing experience and directing behavior by the use of prototypes, metaphors, scripts, and narratives. Although the experimental system is generally adaptive in natural situations, it is often maladaptive in unnatural situations that cannot be solved on the basis of generalizations from past experience but require logical analysis and an understanding of abstract relations.
[B]ehavior is guided by the joint operation of the two systems, with their relative influence being determined by the nature of the situation and the degree of emotional involvement. Certain situations (e.g., solving mathematical problems) are readily identified as requiring analytical processing, whereas others (e.g., interpersonal behaviors) are more likely to be responded to in an automatic, experientially determined manner. Holding such situational features constant, the greater the emotional involvement, the greater the shift in the balance of influence from the rational to the experiential system (Denes-Raj & Epstein, 1994). "
One might ask, why are there two systems? Many of us have at times wished that our emotions could quiet themselves or even go away. Our culture has a bias towards logic and is suspicious of our emotional side. To quote Ayn Rand:
"A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a bail and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown..."
Not matter how much we wish we could be logical and rational, there is a burgeoning literature that says otherwise. Our decisions are evident in our brain activity long before we are consciously aware (For example, see Libet et al., 1983 and Dennett, 2003). We have a dual system of decision making because it works. Think about it. How often to we make decisions where we have all the information we need to be absolutely sure that our logical deduction is correct? I would venture to say that being sure is limited to only our most simple and concrete decisions. Most every other decision involves weighing facts, impressions, intuitions, and feelings and making as best a decision as possible.
Phineas Gage is perhaps the most famous neurology patient of all time. After a gruesome injury in which he was impaled through his skull by a metal rod and then miraculously recovered, poor Phineas retained all the logic he ever had, but was completely unable to make a decision. He was also left without any awareness or expression of emotion (Demasio, 1994). The very act of making a decision is an emotional process. We choose our decisions among competing alternatives based not only the evidence, but what feels best to us, our "gut level" reaction.
The story behind this dual system is most evident in normal social development.
The Attachment Relationship
John Bowlby (1969/1982) is credited as the founder of Attachment Theory, based on his observations that the quality of a child's social development was largely determined by the quality of the child's relationship with her caregiver. Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main began the research that would ultimately follow children over their first 20 years of development demonstrating Bowlby's concepts to be true and elaborating that theory to account for how, as a child and adult, how freely and effectively she can think, feel, remember, and act (Ainsworth et al., 1978, Main et al., 1985 & Fonagy et al., 2002). Fonagy went on to find that a parents style of attachment before birth predicts their one year old child's attachment style. The parent's ability to mentalize strongly predicted their child's subsequent security. Perhaps most importantly, the the strength of the adult's ability to mentalize enables her to strengthen their attachment style.
"Attachment is not an end in it's self; rather it exists in order to produce a representational system that has evolved, we may presume, to aid human survival. The quality of our attachment enables us to understand, interpret, and predict the behavior of others as well as our own behavior. It is the cornerstone of social intelligence (Wallin, 2007)."
It is through attachment experiences as a child that she develops rudimentary affect regulation. In the loving care of her caregiver, the child senses that connection to others can be a source of relief, comfort, and pleasure. The child ultimately learns that she -- in expressing its full range of bodily and emotional experiences and needs -- is good, loved, accepted, and competent.
One of the more interesting parts of the process is the role of imitation, mirroring and empathy. There is growing evidence that the same brain areas involved in the execution and observation of motor actions also become active when people listen to sentences that describe the performance of human actions using hands, mouths, or legs, or when people imagine performing an action without actual movement. It would appear that the processes of motor control, mirroring, and mental simulation (or imagination) rely on shared neural circuits (van Gog et al., 2009). While a mother interacts with her child, they interact in a largely non-verbal body-based union. This process of attunement builds within her child a largely emotional communication system that becomes the foundation of intimacy in all future relationships.
"[T]hrough a kind of "social biofeedback," the child comes to associate the initially involuntary expressions of her emotions with the responses of the caregiver. That is, the infant comes to "know" that her affects are responsible for evoking the caregiver's affect-mirroring responses. Thus, in the most desirable scenario, the infant is learning a number of very useful things: (1) that expressing her feelings can bring about positive outcomes--which generates positive feelings about the self and others; (2) that she can have impact on others--which generates a dawning sense of agency or self-initiative; and (3) gradually, that particular affects elicit particular reactions-- which helps her begin to differentiate and eventually name her feelings (Fonagy et al., 2002) A relationship of secure attachment can thus be seen as a school in which we learn to effectively regulate affects not only in early childhood but throughout our lives (Wallin, 2007)"
Through the secure attachment experience, the child learns to reflect on her feelings and thoughts. Her sense of security, flexibility, and internal freedom becomes very much enhanced. Secure attachment embodies a quality of attunement and contingent responsiveness between mother and infant that is close but imperfect. By the very process of attunement, distraction and reconnection, the child learns that her own internal states are sharable and, at the same time, distinct from those of her caregiver, she recognizes herself and her caregiver as a separate persons, rather than objects. From the loss and regaining of attuned connection emerges from the discovery that the other, and the relationship itself, can survive anger and conflict, and learn to balance the needs for self-definition and relatedness. The parent must reflect on emotion, her's and her child's, so as to make sense and inform her responses. She effectively regulates her own emotions while modeling how the child can regulate hers. Raw feelings become namable and integrated in interaction with her. The child creates representations of her emotion, then the parent names those emotions through her body, feelings and finally words.
Much learning is acquired in non-verbal form while the child acquires language skills. Some learning may be stored unconsciously, for example, when thought, felt, or spoken, this information could threaten vital relationships, especially formative and traumatic experiences. The center of verbal memory, the Broca's area of brain doesn't come on-line until 18-36 months, remains a secondary process until after a child enters school and continues to mature well into adolescence. Traumatic experiences cause overwhelming emotions, which effectively shuts down Broca's area, limiting verbal learning. So much emotional learning happens after childhood during highly emotional experiences.
Explicit memory, the verbal memory of Broca's area of the brain, can be consciously retrieved and reflected upon. This memory can be readily turned into words, it is symbolic, and it's content is information and images. Implicit memory is present from birth and includes reflexes that are not learned as well as emotional learning acquired in childhood or traumatic learning at any age. It is largely nonverbal, nonsymbolic, unconscious in the sense that it can't be reflected upon. The content includes emotional reactions, patterns of behavior, and skills related to knowing how to do things without thinking. These memories cannot be recalled, but they can be recognized, for example, like deja vois. From implicit memory comes our personal style, implicit relational knowing (gut-level knowledge) and some relational expectations. Perhaps most significant to this article, implicit memory includes the internal working model of attachment. Our attachment style is often enacted without awareness, especially in non-verbal communication.
Ultimately, through our early intimate relationships, we make sense of ourselves and others in terms of a "coherent autobiographical and biographical narrative", a personal story (Wallin, 2007).
Adult Experience - Duality Integrated
We have a built in need to be around people. Our social nature has been built in for thousands of generations with genetic and biochemical support. We feel pleasure just being around people with whom we feel safe. Our social group also influences our behaviors and values. We are reminded by our knowledge of social expectations within the
Continue reading The Essence of Human Experience: What is Normal? Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth, Part V.
Sandra Bullock makes some very solid points about the continued double moral standard between men and women in our society. It is only by repeated public statements will the culture begin to shift.
However, she missed the universal point. I don't think a young boy would escape the slash of verbal harassment about having a lisp. While there is a natural push for social culture to demand a certain level of conformity, children do not understand the limits of this wisdom or can reason through the paradox of conformity for the sake of conformity. [Soap box time] Children need the leadership of adults in social settings, primarily schools, to learn tolerance and the dangers of scapegoating. Adults continue to abdicate this role, parents pointing at schools, schools pointing at parents. During the critical times of elementary school, teachers have the major role, there can be no doubt. Parents seldom see their kids in a group, and currently other parents do not reliably tolerate their friends parents intervening with their own children. That too needs to change, but it won't until neighbors can actually recognize each other and learn how far they can trust each other.
Our natural process of social education has broken down. We now know enough to create a scientifically based social/emotional education curriculum. It's time to act.
"Why is that young boys and men are unique and eccentric and mavericks when they're different but women are 'odd' when we are eccentric or different? Would I have wished someone would have said to me when I was 12 or eight when I had my speech impediment? Uniqueness is something my mother pounded it into me," Bullock recently told Tarts. "She said be unique and I didn't understand it then, now I look at it and I go I wouldn't want to be like anyone else and I know I'm off. I had a lisp as a child, it's all these things that made me different and I tried to squelch and then once I realized I had squelched them I didn't feel like myself anymore."
Bullock is so upset with the unwritten rules and regulations in today's world she wants to spread a strong message to young girls.
"Don't change, be who you are. Society is really strong in their opinions so I made peace with the fact that the things I thought were weaknesses or flaws were just me," she added. "Why are we forcing people to follow another person's path in life taking away their real happiness? What is about us that is a culture that tries to get rid of what we consider the runt? Sometimes the runt turns out to be the best of the litter.""
Many of the boomer adults were raised with a lot of TV. It would appear things have gotten worse. We know a lot more about what TV does to children, but it doesn't appear to have had much effect. Simple logic will tell us that the experience of TV will decrease a child's ability to tolerate a delay in gratification of desires. Certainly, the TV ads are designed to create the desire for things we didn't know we needed, a certain frustration that we can't have it all, now. But it's much worse than that.
John M Grohol PsyD owner of PsychCentral.com is usually a man who politely understates things. But, he pulls no punches in a recent article.
"Most child psychologists and child development experts recommend no TV whatsoever for a child before the age of 2 or 3. None. Yet a whopping 43 percent of parents plop their toddler down in front of the television set, apparently blind to the consequence of their actions.
[..]There are also the studies that show that teens who watch more sexual content on TV are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the next three years than their peers.
Countless studies have documented the inverse link between devotion to the boob tube and achievement in school. Researchers at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons concluded in 2007, for example, that 14-year-olds who watched one or more hours of television daily "were at elevated risk for poor homework completion, negative attitudes toward school, poor grades, and long-term academic failure.'' Those who watched three or more hours a day were at even greater risk for "subsequent attention and learning difficulties,'' and were the least likely to go to college.
In 2005, a study published in the American Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that the harm caused by TV watching shows up even after correcting the data to account for students' intelligence, family conditions, and prior behavioral problems. The bottom line: "Increased time spent watching television during childhood and adolescence was associated with a lower level of educational attainment by early adulthood.''
The baleful effects of TV aren't limited to education. The University of Michigan Health System notes on its extensive website that kids who watch TV are more likely to smoke, to be overweight, to suffer from sleep difficulties, and to have high cholesterol.
"
From Research Digest Blog, here is an excerpt from an article commenting on the effects of TV on in the background while a young child plays.
"Schmidt's team described the disruptive effects of the background TV as "real but small". While the current study doesn't say anything about the possible developmental consequences of TV-disrupted play, previous research has shown that shorter play episodes and less focused attention tend to be associated with poorer developmental outcomes. Moreover, a previous unpublished study by the present team of researchers showed that background TV reduces how often parents interact with their children. "Taken together," the researchers said, the new and previous findings lead us to "hypothesise that background television, as a chronic influence, is by itself an environmental risk factor in children's development."
"
"Sigman's review in fact only cites two published studies that show direct associations between TV viewing in this age group and negative consequences. The first, a 2004 longitudinal study by Dimitri Christakis and colleagues of 1200 children, found that for every extra hour of average daily TV viewing between birth and three years, the children were 10 per cent more likely to have attentional problems at age seven. The second, a cross-sectional study by Dimitri Christakis and Darcy Thomson, found that among 2068 infants aged between four months and three years, those who watched more television also tended to have less regular afternoon and nighttime sleeping schedules.
The research base becomes more substantial when the focus is broadened to include TV viewing in older childhood and adolescence. For example, two studies by Robert Hancox and colleagues reported detrimental associations between TV viewing between the ages of five and 15, and educational attainment and several health measures at 26 years. Sigman's review, which also discusses harmful associations between adult TV viewing and mental and physical health, concludes these 'findings are set to re-cast the role of the television screen as the greatest unacknowledged public health issue of our time'.
However, not all experts are sympathetic to Sigman's view. Dr Brian Young at the University of Exeter told us children are active in the way they use TV - they don't just sit on the receiving end of a stream of audiovisual input. 'There certainly are benefits for children interacting with TV,' he said. 'They learn stuff - it's as simple as that. But the best learning environment is where the mother or the family collectively consume television and discuss what's being seen. In that sense it's a 'window on the world'. However, he added: 'Any medium has a downside and unsupervised viewing by very young children - the "TV as a babysitter" - is not helpful.' "
Now consider the effects of violence in TV and video games. Are we training our children to tolerate routine violence? I think so. It fact, it would appear that TV is an experiment on our children increasing obesity, tobacco and alcohol use, risky sexual behaviors, violence and social isolation.
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