Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  THE CAPACITY FOR JOY

  When it comes to the capacity for joy, Richard Davidson nears the upper limits. Without question, he’s just about the most upbeat person I know.

  Davidson and I were graduate students together years ago, and he has had an outstanding research career. When I became a science journalist, I got in the habit of consulting him for explanations of new—and, for me, puzzling—findings in neuroscience. Just as I found his research pivotal when I was writing Emotional Intelligence, I drew on his work again in my exploration of social neuroscience. (For instance, his lab discovered that the more the orbitofrontal cortex activates as a mother gazes at a picture of her newborn, the stronger her feelings of love and warmth.)

  As a founder of the field of affective neuroscience—the study of emotions and the brain—Davidson’s research has mapped the neural centers that give each of us a unique emotional set point. This neural pivot point fixes the range that our emotions typically swing through during any given day.19

  That set point—whether dour or upbeat—has remarkable stability. Research studies have found, for instance, that the elation people feel after winning a huge amount of money in a lottery settles back in about a year to the range of mood they felt before winning. The same holds true for people who become paralyzed in an accident; a year or so after the initial agony, most return to nearly the same daily moods they had before the accident.

  When people are in the grip of distressing emotion, Davidson has found the two brain areas most active are the amygdala and the right prefrontal cortex. When we’re feeling cheery, those areas are quiet, while part of the left prefrontal cortex lights up.

  Activity in the prefrontal area alone tracks our moods: the right side activates when we are upset, the left when we are in good spirits.

  But even when we are in a neutral mood, the ratio of background activity in our right and left prefrontal areas is a remarkably accurate gauge of the range of emotions we typically experience. People with more right-side activity are particularly prone to down or upsetting moments, while those with more activity on the left generally have happier days.

  The good news here: our emotional thermostat does not seem to be fixed at birth. To be sure, each of us has an innate temperament that makes us more or less prone to happy or dour days. But even given that baseline, research links the kind of care we get as children to our brain’s capacity for joy in adulthood. Happiness thrives with resilience, the ability to overcome upsets and return to a calmer, happier state. There seems to be a direct link between stress resilience and that capacity for happiness.

  “A great deal of animal data,” Davidson observes, “shows that nurturing parents—a rodent mother who grooms and licks, for example—promote happiness and resilience under stress in their young. In animals and humans alike, one index of positive affect is a youngster’s capacity for exploration and sociability, especially under stress like that of an unfamiliar setting. Novelty can be appraised as a threat or as an opportunity. Animals who had more nurturing in their upbringing will view a strange place as an opportunity. They’ll explore it more freely and be more outgoing.”

  That finding in animals fits a discovery Davidson made in studies of humans—specifically adults in their late fifties, who had been assessed every few years since their high school graduation. Those with most resilience and the best daily moods showed a revealing pattern of brain activity when Davidson’s group measured their happiness set point. Intriguingly, those adults who recalled being most well nurtured as children tended to have the more joyous pattern.20

  Were those warm memories of childhood just created by the rosy lens on life that good moods provide? Perhaps. But as Davidson told me, “The amount of joy in a toddler’s relationships appears critical to setting the brain pathways for happiness.”

  RESILIENCE

  A wealthy New York couple of my acquaintance had a daughter late in life. These middle-aged parents dote on her. They have hired a team of nannies to give her constant attention, and they have bought her what looks like an entire store’s worth of toys.

  But despite her castlelike dollhouse, jungle gym, and rooms packed with playthings, it all seems a bit forlorn: this four-year-old has never had a friend over to play. Why? Her parents are afraid that another child might do something that would upset her.

  The couple subscribes to the misguided theory that if their child can avoid all stressful situations, she will develop into a happier person.

  That notion misreads the data on resilience and happiness: such overprotection is in fact a form of deprivation. The idea that a child should avoid misery at all costs distorts both the reality of life and the ways children learn to find happiness.

  More important for a child than seeking some elusive perpetual happiness, researchers find, is learning how to deescalate emotional storms. The goal for parenting should not be achieving a brittle “positive” psychology—clinging to a state of perpetual joy in one’s children—but rather teaching a child how to return on her own to a state of contentment, whatever may happen.

  For instance, parents who can “reframe” an upsetting moment (the wisdom in the old saying “No use crying over spilt milk”) teach their children a universal method for undoing distressing emotions. Such small interventions instill in a child’s repertoire for managing bad times the ability to look on the bright side. At the neural level these lessons become ingrained in the OFC circuitry for managing distress.21

  If we fail to learn in childhood how to handle the full catastrophe of a rich life, we grow up emotionally ill prepared. Learning to build these inner resources for a happier life demands that we endure the hard knocks of the playground—boot camp for the inevitable upsets of everyday relationships. Given how the brain masters social resilience, children need to rehearse for the ups and downs of social life, not experience a steady monotone of delight.

  When a child gets upset, the value lies in attaining some mastery over that reaction. A child’s success or failure in this essential lesson will be reflected in his stress hormone levels. In the beginning weeks of the school year, for example, preschoolers who are most outgoing, socially competent, and well liked show high activity in the brain circuit that triggers stress hormones. This reflects their physiological effort to meet the challenge of entering a new social group, their playmates.

  But for these more socially adept preschoolers, stress hormone levels decline as the year goes on, as they find a comfortable niche in this small community. In contrast, those preschoolers who remain unhappy and socially isolated as the year continues maintain high stress hormone levels or even increase them as the year wears on.22

  The “first week jitters” rise in stress hormone activity is a helpful metabolic response, mobilizing the body to handle a dicey situation. The biological cycle of arousal and return to normal as a challenge becomes mastered etches the sine wave for resilience. By contrast, children who are slow to develop distress mastery show a very different pattern. Their biology seems inflexible, their arousal levels “stuck” in too high a gear.23

  JUST SCARY ENOUGH

  When she was two, one of my granddaughters went through several months of being fascinated by the cartoon movie Chicken Run, a somewhat dark comedy about poultry trying to escape a farm where they are doomed to be slaughtered. Parts of the cartoon have the grim tone of a prison movie rather than the lightness of a children’s cartoon. Some of the scary scenes arouse outright fear and terror in a two-year-old.

  Yet for a long while my granddaughter insisted on seeing that movie over and over, week after week. She freely admitted she found Chicken Run “really scary.” Yet in the next breath she would add that it was her favorite movie.

  Why should a movie so scary exert such an inexorable pull on her? The answer may well lie in her neural learning as she repeatedly watched those frightening scenes, a delicious mix of still being a bit frightened yet knowing it would end up all right.

  Some of the most convi
ncing neuroscience data for the benefits of getting just scared enough comes from studies of squirrel monkeys.24 When they were but seventeen weeks old (the monkey equivalent of young childhood), the monkeys were taken from their cozy cage once a week for ten weeks. They were put for an hour in another cage with adult monkeys they did not know—terrifying for squirrel monkey youngsters, as ample signs testified.

  Then, when they had just been weaned (but were still emotionally dependent on their moms), the same monkeys were placed with their mothers in a strange cage. This cage had no other monkeys but offered abundant treats and many places to explore.

  Those monkeys who had earlier been exposed to the stressful cages proved far braver and more curious than others their age who had never left their mothers’ side. They explored the new cages freely and treated themselves to the snacks there; those who had never left the safe haven of their mothers just clung timidly to her.

  Significantly, the independent youngsters showed no biological signs of fear arousal, although they had done so amply as youngsters while in the strange cage. The regular visits to a scary place acted as an inoculation against stress.

  In humans as well as monkeys, neuroscientists conclude, if youngsters are exposed to stresses they learn to handle, this mastery becomes imprinted in their neural circuitry, leaving them more resilient when facing stress as adults. Repeating that sequence of fear-turning-into-calm apparently shapes the neural circuitry for resilience, building an essential emotional capacity.

  As Richard Davidson explains, “We can learn to be resilient by being exposed to a threat or stress at a level that allows us to manage it.” If we are exposed to too little stress, nothing will be learned; too much, and the wrong lesson might become embedded in the neural circuitry for fear. One sign that a scary movie is too overwhelming for a child can be seen in how quickly he recovers physiologically. If his brain (and body) stay stuck in the fear-arousal mode for a distressingly prolonged period, then what’s being rehearsed is not resilience but the failure to recover.

  But when the “threats” a child confronts are within an optimal range—where the brain temporarily mounts a full fear response but then returns to calm—we can assume that a different neural sequence has unfolded. This may well explain my two-year-old granddaughter’s pleasure in that scary movie. And it may be why so many people (particularly preteens and teenagers) adore movies that scare them.

  Depending on the age and the child, even mildly scary fare can be too much. The old Disney classic Bambi, in which a doe’s mother dies, was in its day traumatic for many of the children who flocked to see it. A toddler, of course, should not watch a terror-stirring movie of the Nightmare on Elm Street variety, but the same movie might give a teenager’s brain lessons in resiliency. While the toddler would be overwhelmed, the teen might enjoy a yeasty mix of peril and pleasure.

  If a too-horrific movie haunts a child for months with nightmares and daytime fearfulness, then the brain has failed to master fear. Instead it merely primes, and perhaps subtly strengthens, the fear response itself. Researchers suspect that, for children who suffered repeatedly from overwhelming stress—not the on-screen variety, but the much scarier raw reality of disturbingly turbulent family life—this very neural path may lead in some cases to depression or anxiety disorders in later life.

  The social brain learns well by imitating models—like a parent who calmly watches what otherwise seems so menacing. When my granddaughter would get to a particularly frightening moment in the movie and hear from her mommy the comforting words “It will be okay” (or get the same message tacitly by feeling the reassuring presence of her daddy as she sat in his lap), she felt secure and in control of her feelings, a sense that she can deploy in other trying times.

  Such basic lessons in childhood will leave their mark through life, not just in a basic stance toward the social world but in one’s ability to navigate the whirlpools of adult love. And love, in turn, fosters its own lasting biological imprints.

  PART FOUR

  LOVE’S VARIETIES

  13

  Webs of Attachment

  In the terrain of the human heart, scientists tell us, at least three independent but interrelated brain systems are at play, all moving us in their own way. To untangle love’s mysteries, neuroscience distinguishes between neural networks for attachment, for caregiving, and for sex. Each is fueled by a differing set of brain chemicals and hormones, and each runs through a disparate neuronal circuit. Each adds its own chemical spice to the many varieties of love.

  Attachment determines who we turn to for succor; these are the people we miss the most when they are absent. Caregiving gives us the urge to nurture the people for whom we feel most concern. When we are attached, we cling; when we are caregiving we provide. And sex is, well, sex.

  The three intermingle in an elegant balance, an interplay that, when all goes well, furthers Nature’s design for continuing the species. After all, sex alone merely begins the job. Attachment provides the glue that keeps not just a couple but a family together, and caregiving adds the impulse to look after offspring, so our children can grow up to have their own. Each of these three strands of affection connects people in different ways.1 When attachment entwines with caring and sexual attraction, we can savor full-blown romance. But when any of these three goes missing, romantic love stumbles.

  This underlying neural wiring interacts in differing combinations in love’s many varieties—romantic, familial, and parental—as well as in our capacities for connecting, whether in friendship, with compassion, or just doting on a cat. By extension, the same circuits may be at work to one extent or another in larger realms, like spiritual longing or an affinity for open skies and empty beaches.

  Many pathways for love travel the low road; someone who fit the narrow definition of social intelligence as based on cognition alone would be clueless here. The forces of affection that bind us to each other preceded the rise of the rational brain. Love’s reasons have always been subcortical, though love’s execution may require careful plotting. And so loving well requires a full social intelligence, the low road married to the high. One or the other alone will not be enough to forge strong, satisfying bonds.

  Untangling the complex neural web for affection may lay bare some of our own confusions and problems. The three major systems for loving—attachment, caregiving, and sexuality—all follow their own complex rules. At a given moment any of these three can be ascendant—say, as a couple feels a warm togetherness, or when they cuddle their baby, or while they make love. When all three of these love systems are operating, they feed romance at its richest: a relaxed, affectionate, and sensual connection where rapport blossoms.

  The first step in forming such a union involves the attachment system, in its scouting mode. As we’ve seen, this system begins its operation in earliest infancy, guiding an infant to seek care and protection from others, most particularly from its mother or other caregivers.2 And there are fascinating parallels between how we form our first attachments in life and how we form our initial connection to a romantic partner.

  THE ART OF THE FLIRT

  Friday night, and a horde of smartly dressed men and women are packed tightly into a bar on New York’s Upper East Side. It’s a singles event, and flirting is the order of the evening.

  A woman parades past the bar heading for the powder room, tossing her hair and swaying her hips. As she promenades past a man who has caught her interest, she lets her eyes meet his for just a moment, and then, as she sees him start to return her gaze, she quickly looks away.

  Her unstated message: Notice me.

  That inviting look, followed by coyness, imitates an approach-withdrawal sequence found in most mammalian species where survival of newborns requires a father’s help; the female needs to test a male’s willingness to pursue and commit. Her flirtatious move is so universal in the art of flirting that ethologists have observed it even in rats: a female will repeatedly run toward and away from a mal
e, or dart past him, wiggling her head, all the while emitting the same high-pitched squeal that rat pups make while playing.3

  The flirtatious smile is catalogued among Paul Ekman’s eighteen varieties: the flirter smiles while facing elsewhere, then gazes directly at the target of ardor just long enough to be noticed, before quickly looking away. That coy tactic takes advantage of an ingenious neural circuit that almost seems to have been planted in the male brain just for that moment. A team of neuroscientists in London discovered that when a man receives the direct gaze of a woman he finds attractive, his brain activates a dopamine circuit that delivers a dollop of pleasure.4 Simply looking at beautiful women, or making eye contact with someone not perceived as attractive, fails to stir this circuitry.

  But whether or not men find a given woman appealing, flirting itself pays off: men most frequently approach those women who flirt a lot, rather than more attractive women who don’t flirt.

  Flirting goes on among people in cultures around the world (as one researcher documented from Samoa to Paris with a camera that takes pictures from its side).5 Flirting is the opening move in a continuing series of tacit negotiations at each step in courtship. The first strategic gambit involves casting a wide net, by reckless broadcasting of one’s readiness to engage.

  Very young infants do the same, promiscuously signaling their interest in interacting with just about any friendly person who happens by and lighting up to welcome whomever responds.6 The parallel in adult flirting includes not just that flirtatious smile but making eye contact and talking animatedly in a high-pitched voice with exaggerated gestures—much like an infant on the prowl for friendly interaction.

  Next comes the Talk. At least in American culture, this essential step in a budding courtship has an almost mythic quality: a conversation with the subtext of determining whether the prospective partner actually would be worth becoming attached to. This step gives the high road a central role in what has hitherto been largely a low-road process, something like a suspicious parent checking out a teenager’s date.