Social Intelligence The New Science of Human Relationships

Chapter One The Emotional Economy One day, late for a meeting in midtown Manhattan, I was looking for a shortcut. So I walked into an indoor atrium on the ground floor of a skyscraper, planning to use an exit door I had spotted on the other side that would give me a faster route through the block. But as soon as I reached the building's lobby, with its banks of elevators, a uniformed guard stormed over to me, waving his arms and yelling, "You can't walk through here!" "Why not?" I asked, puzzled. "Private property! It's private property!" he shouted, visibly agitated. I seemed to have inadvertently intruded into an unmarked security zone. "It would help," I suggested in a shaky attempt to infuse a bit of reasoning, "if there were a sign on the door saying 'Do Not Enter.' " My remark made him even angrier. "Get out! Get out!" he screamed. Unsettled, I hastily beat my retreat, his anger reverberating in my own gut for the next several blocks. When someone dumps their toxic feelings on usexplodes in anger or threats, shows disgust or contemptthey activate in us circuitry for those very same distressing emotions. Their act has potent neurological consequences: emotions are contagious. We "catch" strong emotions much as we do a rhinovirusand so can come down with the emotional equivalent of a cold. Every interaction has an emotional subtext. Along with whatever else we are doing, we can make each other feel a little better, or even a lot better, or a little worseor a lot worse, as happened to me. Beyond what transpires in the moment, we can retain a mood that stays with us long after the direct encounter endsan emotional afterglow (or afterglower, in my case). These tacit transactions drive what amounts to an emotional economy, the net inner gains and losses we experience with a given person, or in a given conversation, or on any given day. By evening the net balance of feelings we have exchanged largely determines what kind of day"good" or "bad"we feel we've had. We participate in this interpersonal economy whenever a social interaction results in a transfer of feelingwhich is virtually always. Such interpersonal judo has countless variations, but they all come down to our ability to change another person's mood, and they ours. When I make you frown, I evoke in you a touch of worry; when you make me smile, I feel happy. In this clandestine exchange, emotions pass from person to person, from outside to insidehopefully for the best. A downside of emotional contagion comes when we take on a toxic state simply by being around the wrong person at the wrong time. I was an unwitting victim of that security guard's fury. Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state. In moments like mine with that guard, as we confront someone's anger, our brain automatically scans to see if it signals some further danger. The resulting hypervigilance is driven largely by the amygdala, an almond-shaped area in the midbrain that triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response to danger. Of the entire range of feeling, fear most powerfully arouses the amygdala. When it is driven by alarm, the amygdala's extensive circuitry commandeers key points throughout the brain, shepherding our thoughts, attention, and perception toward whatever has made us afraid. We instinctively become more attentive to the faces of the people around us, searching for smiles or frowns that give us a better sense of how to interpret signs of danger or that might signal someone's intentions. This increased amygdala-driven vigilance heightens our alertness to emotional cues in other people. That intensified fGoleman, Daniel is the author of 'Social Intelligence The New Science of Human Relationships', published 2006 under ISBN 9780739326794 and ISBN 0739326791.