12
The Set Point for Happiness
A three-year-old in an ornery mood comes upon her visiting uncle, who is a handy target for her grumpiness.
“I hate you,” she declares.
“Well, I love you.” He smiles back, bemused.
“I hate you,” she replies more loudly, adamant.
“I still love you,” he says, more sweetly.
“I hate you!” she yells, with dramatic gusto.
“Well, I still love you,” he reassures her, sweeping her up in his arms.
“I love you,” she concedes softly, melting into his hug.
Developmental psychologists view such pithy interactions in terms of the underlying emotional communication. The I-hate-you/I-love-you disconnect is, in this view, an “interaction error,” and getting back on the same emotional wavelength is “repair” of that error.
A successful repair, like the final rapport achieved between this three-year-old and her uncle, makes both partners feel good. Continued disrepair has the opposite effect. A child’s ability to repair such a disconnection—to weather an interpersonal emotional storm and then reconnect again—is one key to lifelong happiness. The secret lies not in avoiding life’s inevitable frustrations and upsets but in learning to recover from them. The faster the recovery, the greater the child’s capacity for joyfulness.
That capacity, as with so many others in social life, begins in infancy. When a baby and his caregiver are in synch, each reciprocates the other’s messages in a coordinated way. But during the first year of life, babies lack much of the neural wiring necessary to carry off such coordination. They stay well coordinated only about 30 percent of the time or less, with a natural cycle of going from in synch to out of synch.1
Being out of synch makes babies unhappy. They protest via signs of frustration—in effect, asking for help getting back in synch. This betokens their first attempts at interaction repair. Mastery of these essential human skills seems to begin in those small shifts from out-of-synch misery to in-synch calm.
Everyone in a child’s day offers a model, for better or for worse, of how to handle distress. This learning goes on implicitly (no doubt via mirror neurons) as a child witnesses how an older sibling, a playmate, or a parent manages their own emotional storms. Through such passive learning, the OFC’s regulatory circuits for calming the amygdala “rehearse” whatever strategy the child witnesses. A bit of this learning also goes on explicitly whenever someone reminds or helps a child to manage her own rocky feelings. With time and practice, the OFC circuitry for regulating emotional impulses gradually strengthens.
Children learn not only to calm down or resist emotional impulses but also to strengthen their repertoire of ways to affect others. This lays the foundation for becoming an adult who can react the way that three-year-old’s uncle did when he lovingly melted away her grumpiness—rather than stiffening and warning, “Don’t you dare speak to me that way!”
By age four or five, children are able to shift from simply trying to control their upsetting emotions to having a greater understanding of what causes their distress and what to do to relieve it—a sign of high-road maturation. Parental coaching in the first four years of life, some psychologists suspect, may be particularly potent in shaping a child’s later abilities to manage her emotions well and to handle rocky encounters smoothly.
To be sure, adults do not always offer the best models. In one study parents of preschoolers were observed during a marital disagreement. Some couples were antagonistic and disjointed in their attempts to resolve their conflicts. Neither party listened to the other, they were angry and contemptuous, and they often withdrew from each other as their hostility grew. The children of these couples imitated this pattern with their playmates, being demanding and angry, bullying and hostile.2
In contrast, those couples who during their disagreements displayed more warmth, empathy, and mutual understanding also approached parenting together with greater harmony, even playfulness. And these parents had children who in turn got along better with playmates and could work disagreements out more productively. How couples work out their disagreements predicts their children’s conduct, even years later.3
If all goes well, the result will be a child who is resilient in the face of stress and able to recover from distress and to attune effectively. It takes a socially intelligent family to help build what developmental psychologists call a “positive affective core”—in other words, a happy child.4
FOUR WAYS TO SAY NO
A fourteen-month-old boy, so typically for that mischievous age, gets into a dangerous fix as he tries to climb onto a table where a lamp perches precariously.
Consider several possible ways a parent could respond:
• Give a firm “No!” and then tell him climbing is for outdoors—and take him there to find a place to do so.
• Ignore the boy’s climbing, only to hear the crash of the falling lamp, pick it up, and quietly tell him not to do that again—and then pay no attention to him.
• Shout an angry “No!” but feel guilty about reacting too harshly, give him a reassuring hug, then leave him alone because he has been such a disappointment.
These parental reactions—implausible as some may seem—all represent discipline styles that appear repeatedly in observations of parents and children. Daniel Siegel, the UCLA child psychiatrist who offers the scenarios, has emerged as one of the most influential contemporary thinkers in psychotherapy and child development as well as a pioneer in social neuroscience. Siegel argues that each of these types of parental reaction shapes centers in the social brain in unique ways.5
One moment for such shaping comes when a child confronts something upsetting or confusing, and she looks to her parents, reading not just what they say, but their entire demeanor, to learn how to feel and respond. The messages parents send at such “teachable moments” slowly build the child’s sense of herself and how to relate to—and what to expect from—the people around her.
Take the parent who told the climbing boy no, then took him outside to redirect his energies. In the view of Siegel’s colleague Allan Schore, that interaction optimally affects the boy’s orbitofrontal cortex, strengthening the OFC’s emotional “brake.” Here that neuronal array tones down the youngster’s initial excitement, helping him learn how to better manage his impulsivity.6 Once the child applies these neural brakes, the parent teaches that a more appropriate excitement can continue—he can climb a jungle gym but not a table.
What the boy learns, in essence, comes down to: “My parents don’t always like what I do, but if I stop and find something better, everything will be okay.” This approach, in which the parent sets a boundary and then finds a better outlet for the child’s energy, typifies the discipline style that results in secure attachment. Securely attached children experience attunement from their parents—even when they’ve been naughty.
The “terrible twos,” when babies start to defy their parents by shouting “No!” when they are told to do something, signals a major milestone in brain development. The brain is beginning to be able to inhibit impulse—to say no to urges—a capacity that becomes refined throughout childhood and the teen years.7 Apes and very young children alike have great trouble with this aspect of social life, for the same neural reason: the array of neurons in their OFC that can stop an impulse from being enacted is underdeveloped.
Over the course of childhood the OFC will gradually mature anatomically. A neural growth spurt starts at around age five, allowing more of this circuitry to come online just in time to send the child off to school. That spurt continues apace to around age seven, greatly boosting the child’s self-control and making second-grade classrooms far less rambunctious than kindergarten. Each stage of intellectual, social, and emotional development in a growing child marks a similar step in the maturation of brain areas; this anatomical process continues into the mid-twenties.
What happens in a child’s brain when parents
consistently fail to attune well depends on the precise nature of that failure. Daniel Siegel describes ways parents can fall short and the resulting difficulties their children are likely to endure.8
Take the parent who responded to the table-climbing toddler by ignoring him. That response typifies a parent-child relationship where attunement of any kind occurs rarely, and the parents are emotionally uninvolved with the child. Such children encounter only frustration in trying to get empathic attention from their parents.
The absence of looping—and hence shared moments of pleasure or joy—increases the odds that a child will grow up with a diminished capacity for positive emotions and in later life will find it difficult to reach out to other people. Children of such avoidant parents grow up skittish; as adults, their expression of emotions is inhibited, particularly those emotions that would help them bond with a partner. In keeping with the model their parents displayed they avoid not just expressing their feelings but also emotionally intimate relationships.
The third parent reacted to the table-climbing first by becoming angry, then by feeling guilty, then by being disappointed with the boy. Siegel fittingly describes such parents as “ambivalent.” They may on occasion be warm and caring, but more often they send signals to the child of disapproval or rejection—facial expressions of disgust or contempt, averting their gaze, body language signifying anger or disconnection. This emotional stance can leave the child repeatedly feeling hurt and humiliated.
Children often respond to such parenting with uncontrollable emotional swings, their impulses unchecked or running amok—like the classic “bad boy” who always gets into trouble. Siegel suggests that underlying such out-of-control behavior is a child’s brain that has failed to master how to say no to impulse, a task of the OFC.
But sometimes the sense of not being cared about, or of “whatever I do it’s wrong,” leaves a child despairing—though still yearning for positive parental attention. Such children come to regard themselves as basically flawed. In adulthood, they tend to bring to their close relationships this same ambivalent combination of yearning for affection with an intense fear that they will not get it—and an even deeper fear of being abandoned altogether.9
THE WORK OF PLAY
Even now, in middle age, poet Emily Fox Gordon vividly remembers being “wildly, uncontrollably” happy as a young girl growing up with loving parents in a small New England village. The whole town seemed to embrace Emily and her brother as they zipped down the streets on their bikes: “The elms stood guard, the local dogs greeted us, and even the telephone operators knew us by name.”
Traipsing freely through backyard gardens, racing around the local college campus, she felt as though she were wandering a gentle Eden.10
When a child feels well loved and cared for, worthy in the eyes of especially important figures in her life, the resulting well-being creates a reservoir of positivity. That in turn seems to fuel another basic impulse: the urge to explore the world at large.
Children need more than a secure base, a relationship where they can be soothed. Mary Ainsworth, Bowlby’s chief American disciple, proposed they also need a “safe haven,” an emotionally secure place, like their room or home, to return to after going out and exploring the wider world.11 That exploration can be physical, as in riding a bike around the neighborhood; interpersonal, as in meeting new people and making friends—or even intellectual, as in pursuing a wide-ranging curiosity.
A simple sign that a child feels he has a safe haven is going out to play. Playful fun has serious benefits; through years of hard play, children acquire a range of social expertise. For one, they learn social savvy, like how to negotiate power struggles, how to cooperate and form alliances, and how to concede with grace.
All that practice can go on while playing with a relaxed sense of safety—even a mistake can trigger giggles, while in a schoolroom the same mistake might draw ridicule. Play offers children a secure space to try out something new in their repertoire with minimum anxiety.
Exactly why playing is so much fun has become clearer with the discovery that the brain circuitry that primes play also arouses joy. Identical circuitry for playfulness can be found in all mammals, including the ubiquitous laboratory mouse. This tract hides in the most ancient neural zones, down in the brain stem, a pocket near the spine that governs reflexes and our most primordial responses.12
The scientist who has studied the neural circuitry of play in greatest detail may be Jaak Panksepp, at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University. In his masterwork, Affective Neuroscience, Panksepp explores the neural source of all the major human drives—including playfulness, which he sees as the brain’s source of joy.13 The primal subcortical circuitry that prompts the young of all mammals to romp in rough-and-tumble play, Panksepp says, seems to have a vital role in a child’s neural growth. And the emotional fuel for all that developmental work seems to be delight itself.
In research with rodents in the lab, Panksepp’s group has discovered that play offers another arena for social epigenetics, “fertilizing” the growth of circuitry in the amygdala and frontal cortex. His work has identified a specific compound generated during play that drives genetic transcription in these fast-developing areas of a youngster’s social brain.14 His findings, which likely extend to other mammals like humans that share that same neural landscape, add new significance to that young child’s universal yearning, “I want to play.”
Playing can go on most readily when a child feels she has a safe haven and can relax, sensing the comfort of a trusted caregiver’s presence. Just knowing that Mommy or that nice babysitter is somewhere in the house gives a child enough security to lose herself in another world, one of her own invention.
A child’s play both demands and creates its own safe space, one in which she can confront threats, fears, and dangers—but always come through whole. In this sense, play can be therapeutic. In play everything that goes on gets suspended in an “as if” reality. For example, play offers children a natural way to manage feared separations or abandonments, rendering them instead opportunities for mastery and self-discovery. Likewise, without fear or inhibition, they can face desires and impulses that are too dangerous to enact in reality.
A clue to why we want a play “mate”—why being two makes playing more joyful—lies in our wiring for being tickled. All mammals have “tickle skin,” peppered with specialized receptors that transmit the brain messages for a playful mood. Tickling triggers the belly laugh, which has circuitry distinct from that for smiling. The human belly laugh, like play itself, has approximations in many mammals, which is always elicited by tickling.
In fact Panksepp discovered that like human toddlers, baby rats are drawn to adults who will tickle them. The tickled rat utters a chirp of delight that seems to be an evolutionary cousin of the rapturous laugh of a tickled three-year-old child. (In rats, it’s a high-frequency chirping at about 50 kilohertz, out of range of the human ear.)
In humans the tickle zone runs from the back of the neck around the rib cage—the easiest patch of skin to launch a youngster into uncontrolled gales of laughter. But triggering that reflex demands another person. The reason we can’t tickle ourselves seems to be that the neurons for tickling are tuned to react to unpredictability—which is why simply wiggling a finger at a youngster along with a threatening “coochi-coochi-coo” will set off wild laughter—the primal joke.15
The circuitry for playful joy has close ties to the neural networks that make a “ticklish” child laugh.16 And so our brain comes hardwired with an urge to play, one that hurls us into sociability.
Panksepp’s research raises an intriguing question: what do you call a child who exhibits hyperactivity, impulsivity, and unfocused, rapid shifting from one activity to another? Some might see these shifts as indicators of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which has reached epidemic proportions among schoolchildren, at least in the United States.
But Panksepp, extrapolating to
humans from his work with rodents, sees the shifts instead as signs of an active neural system for play. He notes that the psychostimulant medications given to children for ADHD all reduce the activity of the brain’s play modules when given to animals, just as they seem to snuff out playfulness in children. He makes a radical, though untested, proposal: let younger children “vent” their urge to play in an early-morning free-play, rough-and-tumble recess, then bring them into a classroom after their urge to play has been sated, when they can more easily pay attention.17 (Come to think of it, that’s just what used to happen in my grammar school, long before anyone ever heard of ADHD.)
At the brain level, time spent playing pays off in neuronal and synaptic growth; all that practice strengthens brain pathways. Beyond that, playfulness throws off a kind of charisma: adults, children, and even lab rats are drawn to spend more time with those who have had abundant practice playing.18 Some primitive roots of social intelligence surely trace to this low-road circuitry.
In the interplay of the brain’s myriad control systems, the play circuitry defers to bad feelings—anxiety, anger, and sadness—all of which suppress playfulness. Indeed, the urge to play does not emerge until a child feels protected: comfortable with newly encountered playmates, familiar with a strange playground. That same inhibition of playfulness by anxiety shows up in all mammals, reflecting a basic neural design that no doubt has survival value.
As a child matures, the circuitry for emotional control will slowly suppress the effervescent urge to giggle and romp. As the regulatory circuits of the prefrontal cortex develop in late childhood and the early teen years, children are more able to meet the social demands to “get serious.” Slowly these energies are channeled into more “grown-up” modes of pleasure, as child’s play becomes mere memory.
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 21
