Emotional Intelligence?

[ensign_beedrill 0]

I read this in The Dallas Morning News and I thought it might be of interest to some of you. Especially TheUnicornHunter, because I've seen you talk about this topic before. Surprisingly, the author gets through this article without ever cracking a Vulcan joke. Amazing.

 

Emotions may be more useful than you think

 

SCIENCE

 

05:08 PM CDT on Sunday, September 12, 2004

 

By TOM SIEGFRIED / The Dallas Morning News

 

"Emotional intelligence" might sound like an oxymoron, but ignoring emotions is rarely very smart. And suppressing emotions might even turn you into an actual moron.

 

Well, maybe it's not always that bad. But blocking emotional thoughts does seem to diminish thinking ability, studies show. Concealing your feelings apparently requires mental resources that reduce your ability to remember, communicate and reason.

 

"Typically, people conceal feelings to foster the illusion that they are cool, calm and collected," writes psychologist Jane Richards of the University of Texas at Austin. "There is mounting evidence, however, that these emotion-regulatory efforts may have unintended cognitive consequences."

 

Scientists have long realized that emotions play an important role in making intelligent choices. Nobel economics laureate Herbert Simon once warned that human reasoning is always influenced by emotions, so that ignoring them when studying how people make decisions is bound to lead to a misguided notion of rationality. But that left open the question of how emotions exerted their effects.

 

"Until quite recently ... it was almost taken for granted that if emotions play any part in reasoning, it would be to put sand into the rational choice machinery," write Roberta Muramatsu, of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Yaniv Hanoch, of the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

But in fact, they point out in a new paper to be published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, researchers now know that emotions are essential for making quick and smart judgments. Emotions help focus attention on the most urgent environmental cues and shortcut lengthy reasoning procedures in situations where hesitation is hazardous.

 

And not only can having emotions make you smart, it seems, but suppressing emotions can make you dumb.

 

In one study, participants were shown disturbing slides of injured men, with voiceovers describing each man's name, job and type of injury. Some of the participants were told to refrain from showing any signs of emotion while viewing the slides. Others were given no such emotional prohibition.

 

When tested to see how well they remembered the spoken information, participants suppressing emotion scored much lower than the others.

 

Similar studies show the same effect, regardless of whether the suppressed emotions are unpleasant or pleasant. In conversations between relationship partners, for instance, people hiding feelings remembered less of the discussion than their expressive partners.

 

Other experiments show that people suppressing their feelings don't communicate very well – speaking less, speaking more slowly and not responding to the statements of others. And people suppressing emotions were not given high marks on the rapport scale by their partners.

 

Even reasoning ability seems to suffer when people block their emotional thoughts. Participants in one experiment first viewed an upsetting film while suppressing their feelings, then played a word game (making words from scrambled letters). Suppressors performed poorly.

 

Apparently, suppressing feelings depletes the brain's mental capacity, Dr. Richards suggests in a review published in last month's issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.

 

Alternate strategies for keeping your cool might be less taxing, though, some research indicates. In advance of a potentially emotional experience (say, a job interview), you might "reappraise" its significance (you don't really care if you get the job, perhaps) so that strong emotions are less likely to arise. That way you won't have to exert effort to suppress them and you'll retain your reasoning and communication skills.

 

All this may seem like nothing to get emotional about, yet there are some possibly serious consequences when expressing emotions makes you dumb. Jurors, for instance, are not supposed to be emotionally demonstrative while listening to testimony. Perhaps that explains some otherwise inexplicable acquittals of certain high-profile murder suspects. Or what about students who tell themselves to remain calm while taking a test? They might be unintentionally degrading their ability to get good grades.

 

So far, though, the research is not conclusive enough to warrant emotional outbursts as a way to improve memory. Other emotion-suppression strategies might not be so damaging. Some people mask one emotion by displaying another, for instance – such as laughing when they really want to cry. And it's possible to combine that strategy with others, such as suppressing all thought about a subject likely to evoke emotions, rather than just suppressing the emotions once they occur.

 

Ultimately, researchers must also be able to discern the differences between their artificial experiments and real-world situations. Expressing emotion certainly isn't always a good way to get you high marks for rapport – ask basketball officials who have conversed with Bobby Knight.

 

Still, research into such issues isn't trivial. Controlling emotions without diminishing intelligence is a worthwhile goal, and psychological research, as Dr. Richards notes, is an important part of clarifying what it actually means to be "emotionally intelligent."

 

 

Thoughts? Discussion? Vulcans seem to be very intelligent. Have they found something that we've missed? Can they use more of their brains and therefore suppress emotions while paying attention to other things? Is it a result of hundreds of years of practice and philosophy and development?

[mj 7]

Vulcans are a different species. They may respond differently to the same set of tests given to humans.

 

Perhaps this hypothesis could be investigated 'unscientifically' with T'pol. With her emotions in the open, has she been better or worse as a science officer? I think she did better as a science officer with her emotions under control.

[scaleman 0]

Great, so as if things weren't bad enough intelligence wise, controling emotions makes it worse (if ONLY i could get my folks to believe this ). Unfortunately i have but no choice to control my emotions, and yes, it sucks tremendously.

[ARMS 0]

Any emotional instability can be controlled by drugs, so let them committ the resources rather than your brain.

[Theunicornhunter 2]

That is an interesting article Ensign. Although the findings shouldn't be surprising. If you believe in evolution then you would believe emotions - since we have them - must serve an adaptive purpose.

 

Vulcans are of course a purely fictional creation so there appears to be no need to make them realistic. What has saddened me as I read posts about Vulcans is how many humans buy into the writer's statement that Vulcans are superior because they suppress their emotions.

 

I'm just writing quickly here but I also think it would be interesting to read the actual report because I'm not sure what they meant by "suppressing emotion". In other words, I believe there is a distinction between suppressing emotion and controlling our behavioral response to an emotion.

 

Still, I would like to read more....thanks for bringing this up.