Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  4. See, for example, Beatrice de Gelder et al., “Fear Fosters Flight: A Mechanism for Fear Contagion When Perceiving Emotion Expressed by a Whole Body,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 47 (2004), pp. 16, 701–06.

  5. At least that’s one way we recognize emotion. The existence of other neural routes might mean, for instance, that we don’t have to feel happy to recognize that someone else does.

  6. Affective blindsight, in which a functionally blind person with certain brain lesions can register another person’s emotions from facial expressions via the amygdala, has been found in other patients, too. See, e.g., J. S. Morris et al., “Differential Extrageniculostriate and Amygdala Responses to Presentation of Emotional Faces in a Cortically Blind Field,” Brain 124, no. 6 (2001), pp. 1241–52.

  7. The classic work on emotional contagion is Elaine Hatfield et al., Emotional Contagion (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  8. The high road, however, can be used to intentionally generate an emotion; actors do so routinely. Another example is the systematic generation of compassion in religious practices; this purposeful generation of positive emotion uses the high road to drive the low.

  9. Of course, cognition and emotion are usually not at odds. Most of the time the “high road” and the “low road” act synergistically, or at least weave closely parallel paths to the same place. Likewise, cognition and emotion typically work seamlessly together, to motivate and guide our behavior toward reaching our goals. But in some circumstances they diverge. These divergences produce the idiosyncrasies and seemingly irrational behaviors that have so puzzled behavioral scientists (including psychologists and economists). They also tell us much about the distinct characteristics of these two constituent systems in our brain—when two systems are working closely together, it is hard to tell what is contributing what; when they are in competition, it is easier to distinguish the contribution made by each.

  10. The amygdala, in the midbrain below the cortex, handles automatic emotional processes; the prefrontal cortex, in its executive function, draws inputs from many other neural regions, integrates them, and makes plans accordingly. See Timothy Shallice and Paul Burgess, “The Domain of Supervisory Processes and Temporal Organization of Behaviour,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 351 (1996), pp. 1405–12.

  11. The high road, however, is not immune to bias and perceptual skewing. On the high versus the low road, see Mark Williams et al., “Amygdala Responses to Fearful and Happy Facial Expressions Under Conditions of Binocular Suppression,” Journal of Neuroscience 24, no. 12 (2004), pp. 2898–904.

  12. For the two modes, see John Dewey, Experience and Nature (LaSalle, Ill., 1925), p. 256.

  13. Roland Neumann and Fritz Strack, “‘Mood Contagion’: The Automatic Transfer of Mood Between Persons,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 2 (2000), pp. 3022–514.

  14. On facial mimicry of emotions, see Ulf Dimberg and Monika Thunberg, “Rapid Facial Reactions to Emotional Facial Expression,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 39 (2000), pp. 39–46; Ulf Dimberg, “Facial EMG and Emotional Reactions,” Psychophysiology 27 (1990), pp. 481–94.

  15. See Ulf Dimberg, Monika Thunberg, and Kurt Elmehed, “Unconscious Facial Reactions to Emotional Facial Expressions,” Psychological Science 11 (2000), pp. 86–89.

  16. Edgar Allan Poe is quoted in Robert Levenson et al., “Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity,” Psychophysiology 27 (1990), pp. 363–84.

  17. David Denby, “The Quick and the Dead,” New Yorker 80 (March 29, 2004), pp. 103–05.

  18. On the way movies play the brain, see Uri Hasson et al., “Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision,” Science 303, no. 5664 (2004), pp. 1634–40.

  19. On salience and attention, see, for example, Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 1–20.

  20. Our brains are preprogrammed to pay maximal attention to such cues presumably because in the wild, moments of perceptual and emotional intensity may signal danger. In today’s world, though, they may simply signal what’s playing tonight.

  21. Emily Butler et al., “The Social Consequences of Expressive Suppression,” Emotion 3, no. 1 (2003), pp. 48–67.

  22. That very attempt at suppression spurs repetitive thoughts about the matter; such thoughts intrude when we are trying to focus on something else or merely relax. Despite our desire to exert voluntary control and veto our natural impulses, we can’t always do so 100 percent. If we intentionally suppress our heartfelt emotions—putting on a placid face when we actually feel troubled—our feelings leak nonetheless. Rapport grows stronger as we more openly show our feelings to others. By the same token, the more we try to suppress those feelings, and the stronger those hidden feelings are, the more we inadvertently heighten the tension in the air—a feeling familiar to anyone whose partner “hides” strongly felt emotions. On the costs of suppression see E. Kennedy-Moore and J. C. Watson, “How and When Does Emotional Expression Help?” Review of General Psychology 5 (2001), pp. 187–212.

  23. The neural radar converged on the ventromedial area of the prefrontal cortex. See Jean Decety and Thierry Chaminade, “Neural Correlates of Feeling Sympathy,” Neuropsychologia 41 (2003), pp. 127–38.

  24. On trustworthiness, see Ralph Adolphs et al., “The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment,” Nature 393 (1998), pp. 410–74.

  25. On wiring for trust, see J. S. Winston et al., “Automatic and Intentional Brain Responses During Evaluation of Trustworthiness of Faces,” Nature Neuroscience 5, no. 3 (2002), pp. 277–83. In short, the amygdala scans everyone we meet, making an automatic judgment of trustworthiness. When it judges someone “untrustworthy,” the right insula activates to transmit that to the viscera, and the face-responsive region of the fusiform gyrus lights up. The orbitofrontal cortex responds more strongly when the amygdala judges someone “trustworthy.” The right superior temporal sulcus operates as an association cortex to process the verdict, which is then labeled by the emotional systems, including the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex.

  26. On gaze direction and lies, see Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).

  27. On clues to lying, see ibid.

  28. On cognitive control and lying, see Sean Spence, “The Deceptive Brain,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 97 (2004), pp. 6–9. Lies demand extra cognitive and emotional effort from neural circuitry. This finding has spawned the notion that an fMRI could one day be used as a lie detector. But that day will come only after those using this imaging technology have solved knotty logistical challenges, such as the artifacts created in the signal by someone speaking.

  29. On the way the partner with less power converges more, see Cameron Anderson, Dacher Keltner, and Oliver P. John, “Emotional Convergence Between People over Time,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 5 (2003), pp. 1054–68.

  30. Frances La Barre, On Moving and Being Moved: Nonverbal Behavior in Clinical Practice (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 2001).

  31. Though in the 1950s and 1960s there was a spate of psychophysiological studies of two people interacting, the methods of the time were not precise or powerful enough, and the line of research faded away, not to be revived until the 1990s.

  32. On empathy and shared physiology, see Robert Levinson and Anna Ruef, “Empathy: A Physiological Substrate,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63(1992), pp. 234–46.

  Chapter 2. A Recipe for Rapport

  1. On the study of psychotherapy, see Stuart Ablon and Carl Marci, “Psychotherapy Process: The Missing Link,” Psychological Bulletin 130 (2004), pp. 664–68; Carl Marci et al., “Physiologic Evidence for the Interpersonal Role of Laughter During Psychotherapy,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
192 (2004), pp. 689–95.

  2. For the ingredients of rapport, see Linda Tickle-Degnan and Robert Rosenthal, “The Nature of Rapport and Its Nonverbal Correlates,” Psychological Inquiry 1, no. 4(1990), pp. 285–93.

  3. Frank J. Bernieri and John S. Gillis, “Judging Rapport,” in Judith A. Hall and Frank J. Bernieri, Interpersonal Sensitivity: Theory and Measurement (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001).

  4. For rapport to bloom, full attention, positive feelings, and synchrony must arise in tandem. A boxing bout involves close physical coordination without positivity. Likewise, a marital tiff involves mutual attention and a bit of coordination devoid of affection. The combination of mutual attention and coordination devoid of positive feeling is typical of strangers walking toward each other on a crowded sidewalk: they can brush past without colliding while taking no interest in each other.

  5. On wincing and eye contact, see J. B. Bavelas et al., “I Show How You Feel: Motor Mimicry as a Communicative Act,” Journal of Social and Personality Psychology 50 (1986), pp. 322–29. Likewise, to the degree that mutual focus becomes a joint absorption—as in an engrossing conversation—the entry of a third person will break the conversational spell.

  6. On negative feedback with positive expression, see Michael J. Newcombe and Neal M. Ashkanasy, “The Code of Affect and Affective Congruence in Perceptions of Leaders: An Experimental Study,” Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002), pp. 601–04.

  7. Systematic studies of tipping find that the biggest tips for what customers perceive as better service come in the evening. In one study, the best-tipped waitress earned an average of 17 percent of the bill, while the lowest earned 12 percent. Averaged over a year, that would amount to a substantial difference in income. See Michael Lynn and Tony Simons, “Predictors of Male and Female Servers’ Average Tip Earnings,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 30 (2000), pp. 241–52.

  8. On matching and rapport, see Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh, “The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76 (1999), pp. 893–910.

  9. On faking mimicry, the study was done by a student of Frank Bernieri and was reported in Mark Greer, “The Science of Savoir Faire,” Monitor on Psychology, January 2005.

  10. On moving in synch, see Frank Bernieri and Robert Rosenthal, “Interpersonal Coordination: Behavior Matching and Interactional Synchrony,” in Robert Feldman and Bernard Rimé, Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  11. While strangers, even on a first meeting, can manage suitable nonverbal coordination, getting in synch heightens with familiarity. Old friends most readily fall into a smooth nonverbal duet, in part because they know each other well enough to adapt to personal quirks that might throw others off.

  12. On breathing during conversation, see David McFarland, “Respiratory Markers of Conversational Interaction,” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44 (2001), pp. 128–45.

  13. On teacher-student rapport, see M. LaFrance, “Nonverbal Synchrony and Rapport: Analysis by Cross-lag Panel Technique,” Social Psychology Quarterly 42 (1979), pp. 66–70; M. LaFrance and M. Broadbent, “Group Rapport: Posture Sharing as a Nonverbal Behavior,” in Martha Davis, ed., Interaction Rhythms (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1982). The workings of this choreography can sometimes be counterintuitive; rapport actually feels stronger in a face-to-face interaction when the mimicking looks as it does in a mirror—that is, when person A lifts a right arm in response to person B lifting his left.

  14. On the musicians’ brains in synchrony: E. Roy John, personal communication.

  15. On adaptive oscillators, see R. Port and T. Van Gelder, Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

  16. On models for synchrony, see D. N. Lee, “Guiding Movements by Coupling Taus,” Ecological Psychology 10 (1998), pp. 221–50.

  17. For an overview of the research, see Bernieri and Rosenthal, “Interpersonal Coordination.”

  18. This movement-to-speech synchrony can be extraordinarily subtle. For example, it is more likely to occur early in “phonemic clauses,” the natural chunks of a sequence of syllables that are held together as a single unit of pitch, rhythm, and loudness. (A speaker’s words fall into chains of such clauses, each ending with a barely perceptible slowing of speech before the next one begins.) See ibid.

  19. On limb-to-limb synchrony, see Richard Schmidt, “Effects of Visual and Verbal Interaction on Unintended Interpersonal Coordination,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 31 (2005), pp. 62–79.

  20. Joseph Jaffe et al., “Rhythms of Dialogue in Infancy,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 66, ser. no. 264 (2001). At around four months babies shift their interest from someone’s actions that are perfectly timed to their own to actions that are coordinated but imperfectly timed with theirs—an indication that their inner oscillators are becoming able to better synchronize with the timing. See G. Gergely and J. S. Watson, “Early Socio-Emotional Development: Contingency Perception and the Social Feedback Model,” in Philippe Rochat, ed., Early Social Cognition (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1999).

  21. On mother-infant interaction, see Beatrice Beebe and Frank M. Lachmann, “Representation and Internalization in Infancy: Three Principles of Salience,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 11 (1994), pp. 127–66.

  22. Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity: The Psychology of Infant Communicating,” in Ulric Neisser, ed., The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 121–73.

  Chapter 3. Neural WiFi

  1. On fear, mimicry, and contagion, see Brooks Gump and James Kulik, “Stress, Affiliation, and Emotional Contagion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 (1997), pp. 305–19.

  2. See, for example, Paul J. Whalen et al., “A Functional MRI Study of Human Amygdala Responses to Facial Expressions of Fear Versus Anger,” Emotion 1(2001), pp. 70–83; J. S. Morris et al., “Conscious and Unconscious Emotional Learning in the Human Amygdala,” Nature 393 (1998), pp. 467–70.

  3. The person who sees the face of someone in terror experiences the same inner arousal but less intensely. One main difference is in their level of autonomic nervous system reactivity, which is maximal in the terrorized person and far weaker in the one who sees that person. The more the witness’s insula activates, the stronger their emotional response.

  4. On mimicry, see J. A. Bargh, M. Chen, and L. Burrows, “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (1996), pp. 230–44.

  5. On speed of perception of fear, see Luiz Pessoa et al., “Visual Awareness and the Detection of Fearful Faces,” Emotion 5 (2005), pp. 243–47.

  6. For the discovery of mirror neurons, see G. di Pelligrino et al., “Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study,” Experimental Brain Research 91 (1992), pp. 176–80.

  7. On the pinprick neuron, see W. D. Hutchinson et al., “Pain-related Neurons in the Human Cingulate Cortex,” Nature Neuroscience 2 (1999), pp. 403–05. Other fMRI studies find that the identical brain areas activate when a person observes a finger movement and when they make that same movement; in one, activity was highest when the person made the movement in response to someone else doing so—that is, when mimicking the person: Marco Iacoboni et al., “Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation,” Science 286 (1999), pp. 2526–28. On the other hand, some studies have found that observing a movement activated a different set of neural areas than did imagining making the movement; the interpretation was that the areas involved in recognition of movements differ from those that contribute to the actual production of the movement—in this case, grasping an object. See S. T. Grafton et al., “Localization of Grasp Representations in Humans by PET: Observation Compared with Imagination,” Experimenta
l Brain Research 112 (1996), pp. 103–11.