Complex Numbers

Sweet Emotion

I know I've ranted about "emotional intelligence" in here before. But, my mind being what it is, I don't remember what I said. Something about not having any of it, myself, probably. I don't think I called it bullshit, but I might have said I don't understand it.

So if any of today's Deep Thoughts contradict something I said before, just roll with it. That's what I do.

http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/emotional-intelligence-needs-a-rewrite

Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite
Think you can read people’s emotions? Think again.

The usual note about the date of the article: three years old. I doubt much has changed of any import, though.

You’ve probably met people who are experts at mastering their emotions and understanding the emotions of others. When all hell breaks loose, somehow these individuals remain calm.

Sometimes, remaining calm when "all hell breaks loose" (can we find another cliché, please?) isn't a sign of maturity or wisdom; it's a signal that you're utterly oblivious to what's really going on.

I suppose telling the difference between the two when someone remains calm in a crisis takes emotional intelligence.

They know what to say and do when their boss is moody or their lover is upset.

I know exactly what to do, which is why I have neither boss nor lover.

After all, whom would you rather work with—someone who can identify and respond to your feelings, or someone who has no clue? Whom would you rather date?

I've known lots of people who would rather date the clueless. I've dated some of them.

The traditional foundation of emotional intelligence rests on two common-sense assumptions. The first is that it’s possible to detect the emotions of other people accurately. That is, the human face and body are said to broadcast happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and other emotions, and if you observe closely enough, you can read these emotions like words on a page. The second assumption is that emotions are automatically triggered by events in the world, and you can learn to control them through rationality.

How... how are either of those things "common sense?" Any poker player will tell you that the first is difficult to interpret, especially when someone is focused on remaining neutral. The second goes against all common sense; emotions are internal, and while you can process them, I don't think you can "control" them. And leaving aside for a moment the porous boundary between the outer and inner worlds, those two assumptions seem contradictory; if someone can control their emotions, you can't read them accurately.

In economics, nearly every popular model of investor behavior separates emotion and cognition.

In economics, nearly every popular model of investor behavior is inaccurate.

These two core assumptions are strongly appealing and match our daily experiences.

Do not.

In addition, we now know that the brain doesn’t have separate processes for emotion and cognition, and therefore one cannot control the other.

This tracks with other things I've read. Fictional Vulcans notwithstanding, it seems that logic is utterly dependent on emotion.

In fact, there isn’t a single emotion that has one specific, consistent expression.

No wonder emoji is a foreign language to me.

In short, when it comes to detecting emotion in other people, the face and body do not speak for themselves. Instead, variation is the norm. Your brain may automatically make sense of someone’s movements in context, allowing you to guess what a person is feeling, but you are always guessing, never detecting.

I'm kind of taking notes on this as I read it, because it's been a while since I first came across this article and stuffed it in my Blog Fodder folder. So I don't know if any of these points I'm making will be addressed later in the article. But while I tend to agree about the "guessing, never detecting" thing, I think it's important to do the guessing. Hell, "cold reader" psychics use this to suck money from rubes, but it's a power that can also be used for good.

This idea, however, is rooted in a bogus view of brain evolution. Books and articles on emotional intelligence claim that your brain has an inner core that you inherited from reptiles, wrapped in a wild, emotional layer that you inherited from mammals, all enrobed in—and controlled by—a logical layer that is uniquely human. This three-layer view, called the triune brain, has been popular since the 1950s but has no basis in reality.

Quoting this here because I've seen similar arguments from actual biologists, so I'm inclined to believe that it's true that the triune brain model doesn't reflect reality.

However, I will say this: even scientifically falsified principles can be useful as cognitive models. Hopefully we all know that "air, fire, water and earth" are not truly elements, but the model can be useful in mental categorization. Same thing with Freud's id, ego, superego (which seem to correlate with the triune brain model). As long as we don't fool ourselves into thinking it's an accurate reflection of reality, but only a metaphor, we can use these ideas to make connections.

To improve our understanding of emotional intelligence, we must discard the idea of the brain as a battlefield.

Fair enough, but my brain is often a battlefield. Part of me wants to clean my room. Part of me doesn't. The lazy part always wins, and it's incredibly annoying. That's one reason I look at stuff like this, hoping to find answers for why I can't seem to do what I know I want to do.

Your brain’s most important job is not thinking or feeling or even seeing, but keeping your body alive and well so that you survive and thrive (and eventually reproduce).

Or, in my case, decide that reproduction is for birds and bees, and make the rational decision that there are enough people already. But I'll let that slide, for the sake of considering that evolution is a thing that happens and part of evolution is reproduction in the most general sense.

Your brain spends its entire existence in a dark silent box, called your skull.

Silent? Someone in the neighborhood yesterday played Aerosmith with the volume cranked up to eleven, and "Walk This Way" has been banging around in my skull since then. I don't even like Aerosmith all that much. Silent. Ha. I should be so lucky.

If your brain can construct many different emotions automatically and make fine distinctions among them, it can tailor your emotions better to your situation. You’re also better equipped to anticipate and perceive emotion in others in the blink of an eye. The more emotions that you know, the more finely your brain can construct emotional meaning automatically from other people’s actions.

I'm skipping over some important stuff, here, but I have to wonder if there's some correlation between this and the ability to identify colors beyond the obvious ones we all know from the rainbow. Like, I see red but someone else might see rose, maroon, etc. Might be worth a study.

On the other hand, being better able to understand and identify emotion would help me in the area I need it most: not dealing with other people, which tends to make me uncomfortable, but in writing. How much better would by writing be if, as the author suggests:

Instead of perceiving someone as generically “glad,” learn to distinguish more specifics. Are they “overjoyed” or “contented” or “grateful?” Are they “angry” or “indignant” or “resentful” or “bitter?”

I mean, it's not that I don't know these words. It's that I consider them synonyms.

When you force yourself to learn new words—emotion-related or otherwise—you sculpt your brain’s microwiring, giving it the means to construct those emotional experiences, as well as your perceptions of others’ emotions, more effortlessly in the future. In short, every emotion word you learn is a new tool for future emotional intelligence.

And boy, am I learning new words. I leveled up in French yesterday. It's not the words that I have trouble with, though; it's the ideas behind them. And the grammar, but that's probably irrelevant to my thoughts today. As I'm pretty sure I've noted in here before, different languages seem to mark different ways of thinking, and French especially is well-known for having subtle but important differences to English. Hell, American and British English have some of these differences; for example, I just wrote "differences to" like a Brit instead of "differences from" like a Yank.

Foreign languages are a great source of new emotion words for increasing your brain’s emotional repertoire. You might already know schadenfreude, a transplant from German that means “taking pleasure in another person’s misfortune.”

Like I said, I'm taking notes as I go. Glad to see some confirmation. And yes, I'm intimately familiar with schadenfreude.

Science, after all, is merely our best understanding of how things work, given the evidence at hand. In the face of new discoveries, explanations change, sometimes significantly. That is how science works.

This, I think, is important to understand even outside of the field I'm talking about today. As you know if you've been following along, I'm pretty focused on science. I may not understand emotion all that well, but I am okay with flexibility and change, at least for now. I know there's been a lot of pushback because experts keep changing the story on, for instance, the pandemic that's affecting all of us in some way. But as this author points out, we do the best we can with the knowledge we have. As new data comes in, the story changes, and that's to be expected. I'm also okay with changing my world-view when new evidence comes along.

And I can still work on the emotion comprehension thing.