Archive for the ‘empathy’ Category
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Two studies just published in the June 2010 issue of Leadership Quarterly* have shown that individuals who are considered by others to have leadership ability in ‘informal’ situations are also considered to have higher levels of emotional intelligence, ampathy and emotional regulation, in that they were perceived as having a better ability to understand others emotions and be more emotionally balanced. It is interesting this a perception of informal leaders - leaders that do not have the authority of rank. This is about leaders who took on a leadership role in a project with the consensus of the group. Interestingly the leaders self-perception of their level of emotional regulation intelligence wasn’t as high as the rest of the group perceived them to be. This leads to a question - do people with higher levels of EQ (emotional intelligence) ER (emotional regulation / emotional resilience) and empathy naturally become leaders or do people assume that anyone who is an informal leader must have higher levels of EQ and ER?
It is also very interesting that the informal leaders themselves did not think that their own emotional intelligence and emotional regulation/ emotional resilience was any higher than the norm.
Cote, S. Et al. (2010) Emotional intelligence and leadership emergence in small groups. The Leadership Quarterly, Volume 21, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 496-508
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, emotional resilience, empathy | 2 Comments »
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 »
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
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, Fear Course News, emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, emotional maturity, emotional resilience, empathy | No Comments »
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
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, emotion regulation, emotional resilience, empathy | No Comments »
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