Archive for June, 2010
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
A paper released this month* shows the results of an interesting study comparing the methods we use on The Fear Course (CBT/DBT) with a drug based therapy, in this case naltrexone. It was found that our methods were significantly more effective in helping drug addicted patients develop greater emotional resilience / emotional regulation, increase tolerance to distress and improve social functioning than a course of the drug. Not only that but it reduced the likely hood that the patient would return to drug abuse.
*Azizi, A. Et al (2010). The Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Training and Cognitive Therapy on the Emotional and Addictional Problems of Substance Abusers. IJoP. 2010;2(5) : 60-65
Tags: emotional regulation, emotional resilience, Research, The Fear Course
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Friday, June 25th, 2010
The fourth factor of emotional intelligence is where emotional resilience and emotional regulation feature. Emotionally intelligent or individuals with a high level of emotional maturity are able to manage their own and other peoples emotional states.
The ability to effectively manage emotions requires the abilities to be able to:
- Monitor your own and others emotions on a continual basis,
- Differentiate between emotions,
- Identify emotions accurately,
- Have agency - the belief that you can change feelings or emotional states,
- Use strategies to change emotions, both in yourself and others,
- Assess the effectiveness of the strategies employed,
- Change strategies (if necessary) to effect the desired outcome.
The Fear Course equips people to be able to do all of these particularly in high anxiety / fear situations.
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, emotional resilience, Fear, manage emotion, The Fear Course
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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
Further from my last blog yesterday on the skills needed to be able to use emotions, the next factor of emotional intelligence is the ability to be able to understand emotions. Our emotions convey a lot of information about ourselves, others and the situations we find ourselves in. The ability and skill with which we can think about and decode the messages our emotions convey are vital in our day-to-day lives.
Understanding emotions require a 6 core attributes:
- Emotional Literacy - having the ability to be able to decode, think and talk about our emotions,
- Understand how emotions can combine to form other internal outcomes,
- Know how our emotions can progress from one emotion to another,
- Understand how both yourself and others are behaving due to emotional reactions,
- Predict how people are likely to feel and act in different situations,
- The ability to be able analyse emotions and their causes both in ourselves and others.
As you can see these are quite a complex series of abilities. Emotional resilience and the ability to overcome fear often relies on these skills, particularly the ability to be able to predict and decode our emotions.
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, emotional resilience, overcome fear
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, Fear, emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, emotional resilience, empathy | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
The second skill set required for emotional intelligence and emotional resilience is the ability to be able to use or facilitate our emotions. Our emotions change the way we think. Conversely how we think can change how we feel. What this means is that we can use our thinking and our emotions to effect the outcomes we want. This often requires a reasonably high level of skill especially when fear or anxiety are involved. Fear and anxiety based emotions often short circuit and take over our cognitive (thinking) processes. On The Fear Course we show you how to regain control quickly and easily and stop the emotion taking over.
It is an important skill to be able to change (use) both your thinking and emotions to regain control to develop emotional resilience.
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional resilience, The Fear Course
Posted in Fear, Fear Course News, emotional intelligence, emotional resilience | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 21st, 2010
The first factor of emotional intelligence (EQ) is Emotion Perception which is probably the most basic of the skills involved in EQ.
Put simply emotion perception is the ability to recognise or identify emotions as they occur in both yourself and others. As you can probably well imagine an inability to be able to recognise emotions or confusing them is often a recipe for all sorts of problems. Being oblivious to something like fear can be somewhat dangerous especially in potentially hazardous situations. On the other hand mis-diagnosing emotions can be equally troublesome. On the live Fear Course we often explore the differences between fear, panic, worry, anxiety and nervousness. There is a fair percentage of the population who struggle with this and cannot distinguish between emotions for themselves or are unable to recognise them in others. Not being able to recognise fear, panic or anxiety in others, particularly in work and management situations frequently leads to a lack of empathy and a whole series of relationship issues.
Tags: emotional resilience
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, Fear, emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, emotional resilience | 1 Comment »
Sunday, June 20th, 2010
There is an increasing about of research interest in emotional intelligence (EQ), emotional resilience / regulation at the moment and I would just like to follow on from the last post about emotional resilience and emotional intelligence with a little snippet from some research on the the factors that are considered as elements of emotional intelligence. Mayer et al* suggested in their research that (EQ) for research purposes was largely made up 4 main factors:
- Emotion Perception
- Emotion Facilitation
- Emotion Understanding
- Emotion Regulation
I will unpack each of these a little in the next four blog posts and how they relate to overcoming fear and anxiety, whether it be job interview nerves, driving test nerves or a phobia.
*Mayer, J.D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. (2000). Models of emotional intelligence. In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.), The handbook of intelligence (pp. 396-420). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tags: emotion facilitation, emotion perception, emotion understanding, emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, emotional resilience
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Sunday, June 20th, 2010
Some colleagues at UCL are starting a fMRi study into emotional resilience in 10 - 14 year olds and have put a call out for participants:
WHO WE ARE: We are a group of researchers in the Department of Psychology at University College London (UCL) recruiting 10-14 year olds to participate in a study investigating emotional resilience in children. Our research aims to better understand how those children who have experienced early adversity develop emotional resilience, particularly in terms of brain mechanisms that underpin emotional regulation.
We are recruiting children from schools and youth clubs across London. The study has full ethical approval and all researchers have current CRB checks.
WHAT IT INVOLVES FOR THE CHILD: If a child and their parents are interested in taking part, we will provide them with information sheets and consent forms that will give them full details about the study. If they volunteer we would invite them to our scanner facility in central London (travel expenses reimbursed). Testing usually takes place on Saturdays or during the school summer holidays. The child will complete some questionnaires, play some computer games and have a 35minute fMRI brain scan, during which they will complete 3 simple computer games (e.g. pressing the left or right response key depending on whether they see a male or female face on the screen). While the child is in the scanner, their parent will be asked to complete a few brief questionnaires about their child and the family.
As a thank you, the child will receive a CD with pictures of their brain on it, a t-shirt with a picture of a brain on it, a book about the brain and a generous lunch allowance for themselves and a parent.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: If you are a teacher based in London and think this is something your pupils might want to participate in, or if you have any questions then please contact me, Helen Maris, by phone on 02076 791051 or by e-mail at h.maris@ucl.ac.uk.
Tags: emotional resilience, Research
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Saturday, June 19th, 2010
One of the points I often have to make when I am doing talks / consultancy about emotional resilience / emotional regulation is that it is not about cutting off from your emotions. People who cut off are usually damaged people and not just emotionally but also neurophysiologically. Emotional resilience requires that our empathy remains intact. I have seen the results of disaster managers and emergency service workers who have been so traumatised by their experiences that they have reacted by essentially cutting off emotionally. They make very poor managers, unable to see the situation from others points of view, they frequently don’t notice things (particularly identifying the reactions of others) in the situation they are dealing with and normally alienate people around them.
Jean Decety and his team at the University of Chicago have been conducting a series of fMRI studies looking at empathy and emotional self-regulation. In the studies they have been showing subjects (adolescent boys between 16 to 18) a series of videos depicting either accidental pain, such as someone stubbing their toe and or pain induced on purpose, for example someone being punched. The findings are fascinating. They have discovered that in boys that have been diagnosed with aggressive disorders (aggression indicates levels of a lack of empathy by definition) that the reward areas of the brain are stimulated when they see others in pain. Even more interesting is, when compared with the control group of ‘normal’ boys, those with aggressive disorders lack any activity in the areas of the brain connected to self-regulation and and moral reasoning. These together appear to inhibit the empathetic neural regions of the brain. (Decety, J., & Michalska, K.J. (2010). Neurodevelopmental changes in the circuits underlying empathy and sympathy from childhood to adulthood. Developmental Science, )
Emotional resilience does not mean cutting off from ones emotions, empathy is a core human attribute and this is no-less so for managers!
Tags: emotional, emotional regulation, empathy, Research
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Friday, June 18th, 2010
I am just in the process of analysing some research I have been conducting on websites offering help with anxiety related issues. The results are a bit of a shocker. Here is one of the preliminary results:
Of the 84 sites I examined, (the top 84 Google hits for the search term “anxiety help”) that are offering (paid) help with anxiety and fear related issues 47 of the sites had no contact details what-so-ever so I couldn’t even determine even who the author was or what qualifications they had. I tried to contact the site owners via their whois information and only one replied saying the site was run by someone else.
Of the remaining 37 sites with contact details posted, 12 owners didn’t reply to the repeated requests for information about their qualifications and experience.
The remaining people who did reply eight had no further qualifications or experience beyond having attended a course, often in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) or Hypnosis but hadn’t actually practiced face-to-face with clients.
Only 17 sites of the 84 examined (20.24%) were actually run and designed by experienced and qualified practitioners in the field who had face-to-face clients. That’s 1 in 5 sites.
Basically you have an 80% chance of picking an online therapeutic intervention for your nerves and anxieties designed by heaven knows who.
More results soon…
Tags: anxiety help websites, Research
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
I am often asked about emotional resilience (ER) and what it is. My quick explanation is that emotional resilience is the ability to be able to bounce back quickly when we take an emotional ‘knock’. I am then asked if this is the same as emotional intelligence (EQ). My personal view is yes and no. The father of EQ, Daniel Goldman would say ER is part of EQ. I would agree and disagree!
The reason I say this is that quite a few very resilient people who are not very emotionally intelligent. There is a Scottish saying, “where there’s no sense there’s no feeling!” But is this really resilience or just plain stupidity? If you don’t feel anything thing are you being resilient? It’s a bit like the notion of bravery. If you are not scared the action taken can’t be considered to be brave even if other people would have be scared in that situation. So resilience would normally require the intelligence. However it appears to me that resilience goes beyond intelligence in that it is very possible to have someone who is considered to be emotionally intelligent, (understands their own and others emotions, are empathetic, etc.) and yet struggles with controlling their own heightened difficult emotions.
I suppose the question is; would you normally consider a person to be emotionally intelligent who:
- understood and was in touch with their own emotions,
- could read other people’s emotional state and
- could respond accordingly with empathy to others, and
- were normally in control of their emotions
BUT when an unusual event occurred got frightened for example or suffered from nerves before a job interview?
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, emotional resilience
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