Many people enjoy the level of transparency that social media has brought into their lives. I think that this level of openness can lead to trust on lots of different levels. By revealing everything we can about ourselves, our work, ideas, beliefs, we give people more opportunity to trust us, because we aren't hiding very much.
But we often conceal our sadness or disappointments from social media because we don't want people to give us attention about this, or we think it makes us look bad in some way. How we stay authentic without showing our moany side too much? A modern dilemma.
So would you be prepared to wear a flashing pendant that reveals to others what your heart is doing? This new device called HeartSpark shows to other people if your heart starts beating faster, through fear or excitement or anger or any other complex emotional cocktail which changes your physiology.
Except when it is on the Fake setting, that is....
Operation NICE encourages individuals to be proactively NICE. I like that, now go do something nice for yourself - then for someone else and enjoy life all the more because you did.
This Emotional Life is a three-part series that explores improving our social relationships, learning to cope with depression and anxiety, and becoming more positive, resilient individuals.
Harvard psychologist and best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness, Professor Daniel Gilbert, talks with experts about the latest science on what makes us “tick” and how we can find support for the emotional issues we all face.
Premiering on PBS on January 4th 2010. Looks brilliant!
Their website also has some really interesting blogs.
Further research has been done recently into the mechanisms for physical self-awareness.
In an article in New Scientist, researchers described how tests on a man believed to have a damaged insula, the part of the brain believed to process sensory feelings from around the body. The test showed that the man was aware of an increased heartbeat, until the researchers anaesthetised his chest. The believe that the skin is also responsible for signalling awareness of increased heart rate.
The ability to have this visceral awareness is referred to as interoception. In 'The Mind has a Body of its Own' which we discussed on the blog last year, the authors describe in detail the tests other researchers have done to measure levels of interoception, this time asking subjects to indicate if small electric shocks coincide with beats of their heart. Some work has being done to examine correlations between high interoception and high empathy and sensitivity for other people's emotional states.
The researchers are looking at ways these findings about the skin's role in reporting increased heart activity may help people who suffer from panic attacks etc.
The now famous 'Marshmallow Tests' on delayed gratification, self-control and life success have been in the press again in the last few weeks. There is a short TED below which outlines the original research and also some charming footage of children in a recent replication of the experiment in South America.
Johan Lehrer has written an article on this for The New Yorker and there was also an article in The Times which describes some work being done by think tank DEMOS.
Links thanks to Bruna Martinuzzi and Jane Morrison
In today's Guardian Mark Johnson has written an article entitled Forget Sats: lesson one is a basic emotional education. It is very interesting to read Mark's thoughts on the subject, as his school experience was difficult. He is author of Wasted, which describes his experiences growing up with violence, alcohol and drugs, often crime. Mark's comment in the article was pointedly saying that without offering children suitable support for their emotional needs through school, we are basically excluding them from education, because children with problems cannot hope to access learning in any meaningful way. With so much debate about how to teach emotional intelligence and wellbeing in schools amongst academics, it is very interesting to hear from Mark Johnson who clearly supports this work so strongly.
"At school, these children aren't mentally or emotionally ready for the academic learning designed for others. The curriculum races ahead of them, while their life sentence of labels begins. They are difficult, troublemakers, a problem. Then they're excluded, hoodies, yobs. There's an inevitability about the next label: criminal. However long their sentence, once they've got that label, the prejudices of others ensure they're really lifers by instalment. And maybe they'll add another label too: addict.
...Then we should bring in the professionals - the psychologists, therapists, counsellors and people who understand this way of working. They should teach children how to nurture themselves and each other."
The BBC have launched a new campaign called Headroom which aims to promote wellbeing widely. There are programmes, questionnaires, information of particular difficulties such as OCD and AHDH and depression. Well worth a look. Well done BBC.
"Life is full of ups and downs. So the BBC has created Headroom, a campaign to encourage you to look after your mental wellbeing.
We'll help you cope with the everyday stresses and strains of life and provide a safe place to start finding answers to more complex problems."
This week I am fortunate to be in California with 6 Seconds. Friday and Saturday was the Choose to Change conference in San Jose which saw emotional intelligence practitioners gather to share their work, experiences and research. I found all the talks terribly interesting but listening to Anabel Jensen speak was a real pleasure that will inspire me for a long time to come…..
There is currently a Master Class taking place in Monterey Bay. About twenty 6 Seconds professionals are spending five days learning and teaching around improving our own work and skills, sharing good practice and discussing ways to inject energy and knowhow into the global network of emotional intelligence enthusiasts.
Our collective understanding of human functioning continues to grow and our expertise at transformative teaching with it. One of our challenges is finding ways to make some of the invisible processes and personal changes more visible. This needs to happen to encourage organisations and schools to commit the necessary time, patience and funds into using emotional intelligence to help them develop the types communities, both local and global, that we know we all want, but recognise we can only create collectively.
A new blog looking at stories of great customer service from business:
"RunByHumans tells stories of truly exceptional customer experiences. These stories highlight companies where employees are allowed to act like real human beings. The employees go above and beyond the call of duty to wow customers with their common sense and empathy."
There is an excellent article on trustworthy faces on Social Capital Blog. They write:
“In a paper published in June, they [researchers] suggested that our unconscious bias is a byproduct of more adaptive instincts: the features that make a face strike us as trustworthy, if exaggerated, make a face look happy - with arching inner eyebrows and upturned mouths - and an exaggerated untrustworthy face looks angry - with a furrowed brow and frown. In this argument, people with trustworthy faces simply have, by the luck of the genetic draw, faces that look a little more cheerful to us."
“Just as in other cognitive shorthands, we make these judgments quickly and unconsciously - and as a result, Oosterhof and Todorov point out, we can severely and immediately misjudge people. In reality, of course, cheekbone shape and eyebrow arc have no relationship with honesty.”
The Harvard Business Review has just published a really fascinating article by Tim Brown CEO of IDEO on Design Thinking.
Brown describes the personality of a Design Thinker, and it is a very coherent joining of creativity and emotional intelligence -Thriving's reason for living.
Here are Brown's characteristics to look for:
Empathy. They can imagine the world from multiple perspectives—those of colleagues, clients, end users, and customers (current and prospective). By taking a “people first” approach, design thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs. Great design thinkers observe the world in minute detail. They notice things that others do not and use their insights to inspire innovation.
Integrative thinking. They not only rely on analytical processes (those that produce either/or choices) but also exhibit the ability to see all of the salient—and sometimes contradictory— aspects of a confounding problem and create novel solutions that go beyond and dramatically improve on existing alternatives. (See Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking.)
Optimism. They assume that no matter how challenging the constraints of a given problem, at least one potential solution is better than the existing alternatives.
Experimentalism. Significant innovations don’t come from incremental tweaks. Design thinkers pose questions and explore constraints in creative ways that proceed in entirely new directions.
Collaboration. The increasing complexity of products, services, and experiences has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator. The best design thinkers don’t simply work alongside other disciplines; many of them have significant experience in
more than one. At IDEO we employ people who are engineers and marketers, anthropologists and industrial designers, architects and psychologists.
Pulse is an exhibition by Markus Kison. It is a live visualisation of the recent emotional expressions written on the private weblogs of blogger.com. These emotional expressions are parsed according to a list of synonyms and transform a physical shapeshifting object, which was created analogous to Robert Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion. It is really remarkable that through its design mirrors both Rober Plutchick's emotions model and the human heart.
I have been using the book 'The Body Has a Mind of Its Own' as a resource in teaching since last year. The book now has an excellent website
The research within the book includes a lot of cutting edge findings about mind mapping, how each part of our body corresponds to nerve centres in our brains. Of particular interest is also latest research regarding the neural centre of emotional intelligence: the right front insula.
"Your right frontal insula integrates your mind and body through strong connection to three brain regions. ... In every brain imaging study ever done of every human emotion, the right front insula and anterior cingulate cortex light up together, Craig says. He takes this to mean that in humans, emotions, feelings, motivations, ideas and intentions are combined to a unique degree, and that this is a key element of our humanity."
The book is so fascinating and explains how objects become part of our body map, e.g. tools, cars, hats . . . as well as exploring how this mind mapping can make technology feel so integral to our person.
For anyone writing any essays or papers on emotional intelligence in schools, I wanted to share this great site: Emotionally Intelligent Schools, which has a fantastic list of recent academic articles for pdf download - many of them authored by Salovey, Mayer or Caruso, plus many others.
I particularly enjoyed reading the paper describing the correlation between EI and music: download here.
"The focus in that research is on communication of basic emotions from a performer to a listener via music performance. Musicians are instructed to play a tune in different ways, so as to convey happiness, sadness, anger, or fear, and listeners are required to identify these emotions or rate the degree to which they are expressed by each performance.
Emotional intelligence and emotion recognition in the music task were significantly correlated (r = .54), which suggests that identification of emotion in music performance draws on some of the same sensibilities that make up everyday emotional intelligence.
.....Although recognizing emotion in music performance is of less importance in everyday life, it probably requires much the same processes and sensitivities as recognizing emotion in speech. This would be entirely consistent with evidence suggesting that the emotional cues in music performance are very similar to those in speech (Juslin & Laukka, 2003)."
One of their articles 'School Mental Health: Politics, Power and Practice' really struck a cord. I am very passionate about the methodologies of maximising student's mental health in schools, and in life in general. The article highlights some important issues I have been mulling over for some time. Many schools are very focused on interventions for students struggling emotionally and further single issue focus points, sex, nutrition and drug education. These should ideally be only part of a whole school approach to being well and creating a school environment for children to have the opportunity to thrive, rather than ones where they are coping, should be our vision for schools. I have been arguing against remedial approaches for some time. I really believe that we can inject energy and wellness into schools without the usual negative analysis phase. It is what good leadership should be about.
To quote from the article:
"The school community's status as a 'healthy place' involves the culture and conditions in the physical and psychosocial environments of school for students, staff, parents and the wider community........
Until recently, in most countries the general orientation of the work has been the individual - students with problems and 'at risk' students - and the focus has been on identification and intervention. This orientation represents a linear and 'one-size fits all' view of the world: identify a problem, and treat/intervene with the individual, while ignoring the context and conditions that may contribute to and reinforce the problem. There is growing awareness of the limitations of the single-issue approach. For example, the 'positive psychology' movement has highlighted the previously skewing of practice and argued for addition of focus on 'health' rather than illness and disease, and on the wider environment that affects mental health and well-being."
I love this Manifesto on The Connection Culture which has been posted on the ChangeThis website by Michael Lee Stallard.
A lot of this is familiar, but I like how he has managed the principles based on the 24 Character strengths and virtues from Positive Psychology. Essentially they describe how our individual efforts can bring about good organisational climates... I particularly like to include schools in this....
"The bottom line is that connection plays a critical part in improving individual performance. People who are more connected with others fare better in life than those who are less connected. Connection, because it meets our human needs, makes people more trusting, more cooperative, more empathetic, more enthusiastic, more optimistic, more energetic, more creative and better problem solvers. It creates the type of environment in which people want to help their colleagues.
They are more open to share information that helps decision makers become better-informed. The openness that emerges in a trusting and cooperative environment creates a robust marketplace of ideas that stimulates innovation."
I have become drawn into watching The Apprentice, thanks to the late discovery of BBC iPlayer. It is very compelling watching as you see what can happen when people are asked to work co-operatively in teams, while still attempting to shine as an individual.
Also fascinating is what happens when a member takes on the role of 'project leader' for a particular task.
What is really surprising is that so many years after the publication of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and more recently Social Intelligence and the vast body of evidence suggesting that integrity and relationships win . . . that young high-flyers still seem to be operating by Machiavellian principles. A more recent example of amoral recommendations of how to become powerful are Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power - below some of his ideas...
Law 2 Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies
Law 3 Conceal your Intentions
Law 6 Court Attention at all Cost
Law 7 Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit
Law 8 Make other People come to you – use Bait if Necessary
Law 10 Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky
Law 11 Learn to Keep People Dependent on You
Law 12 Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim
Law 14 Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy
Law 15 Crush your Enemy Totally
Law 16 Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor
Law 20 Do Not Commit to Anyone
Law 21 Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker – Seem Dumber than your Mark
Law 22 Use the Surrender Tactic: Transform Weakness into Power
Law 26 Keep Your Hands Clean
Law 33 Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew
These concepts are explored in an excellent article by Dacher Keltner, co-editor and Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in Greater Good Magazine. Dacher sites some very interesting studies and looks at some of the myths. He says:
"So what is the fate of Machiavellian group members, avid practitioners of Greene's 48 laws, who are willing to deceive, backstab, intimidate, and undermine others in their pursuit of power? We've found that these individuals do not actually rise to positions of power. Instead, their peers quickly recognize that they will harm others in the pursuit of their own self-interest, and tag them with a reputation of being harmful to the group and not worthy of leadership.
Cooperation and modesty aren't just ethical ways to use power, and they don't only serve the interests of a group; they're also valuable skills for people who seek positions of power and want to hold onto them."
The studies however also show that power itself can be damaging to the individual - and the things that we most look for in leaders: social intelligence, deteriorates with power.
"Perhaps more unsettling is the wealth of evidence that having power makes people more likely to act like sociopaths. High-power individuals are more likely to interrupt others, to speak out of turn, and to fail to look at others who are speaking. They are also more likely to tease friends and colleagues in hostile, humiliating fashion. Surveys of organizations find that most rude behaviors—shouting, profanities, bald critiques—emanate from the offices and cubicles of individuals in positions of power. My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain's orbitofrontal lobes (the region of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior."
In a recent study reported on the brilliant Social Capital Blog examines punishment and co-operation.
As AP reports it “Screaming sports coaches and cutthroat tycoons have it wrong: Nice guys do finish first, a new study suggests.”
The AP reported: “Common game theory has held that punishment makes two equals cooperate. But when people compete in repeated games, punishment fails to deliver, said study author Martin Nowak. He is director of the evolutionary dynamics lab at Harvard where the study was conducted….”On the individual level, we find that those who use punishments are the losers,” Nowak said his experiments found.” And those who punished the most, did the worst."
"Our finding has a very positive message: In an extremely competitive setting, the winners are those who resist the temptation to escalate conflicts, while the losers punish and perish," concludes Nowak in the punishment study.
So to all the participants of The Apprentice reading this blog take some advice from Professor Dacher Keltner....
"When we appreciate the distinctions between responsible and irresponsible uses of power—and the importance of practicing the responsible, socially-intelligent form of it—we take a vital step toward promoting healthy marriages, peaceful playgrounds, and societies built on cooperation and trust."
A new study shows that getting angry can actually reduce the body's speed of recovery.
Steve Bloom, professor of metabolic medicine at Imperial College, London, said stress was now increasingly recognized as a factor in recovery rates.
"Your body prioritises and sorts one thing out at a time, so if you are stressed - angry in this case - your body works through that before it gets on with the process of healing.
"We've yet to see a study that categorically proves having an attentive, calming presence by your bedside actually speeds up your recovery, but the evidence is certainly pointing that way."
I can't wait for someone to find a benefit to losing your temper occasionally - there must be one??
Emotional Cities is an art project that studies and visualizes the emotions of individuals and groups.
On the website, anyone can participate by grading their “form for the day” on a scale with seven levels, emotional states denoted by a colour code from purple to red. The median values for cities, countries, and the world, as well as groups of your own creation, are calculated on an ongoing basis. All the results are displayed graphically on the website. It’s not easy to measure feelings, but the results can be surprising.
In some cities the current emotional state of the city will be shown as a light installation in the public space. Scientific studies will be carried out as a continuation of the art project. Emotional Cities is an experiment – not only in the sense of an artistic-psychological study, but also as a hybrid between different media and modes of expression.
They also have a new Facebook application. Sign UP!!!
I discovered by accident The Nicest Things community website which say 'It's · the · little · words · in · life . . .that make it worthwhile'. After scanning the entries for this week I am completely taken with these charming, genuine stories of people sharing lovely things people have said to them. The site has 800 members and I am not surprised.
Some examples:
One of the teachers at my school said this to me one day as I walked into another class:
"You're always smiling! I bet your a lot of fun to be around."
"the name of the community captured my attention...I have a plaque at home that says "Because nice matters"
It seems most of the posters here are young..I am not...I am old. (retired teacher)
the nice thing I was going to post was about an 8th grade boy who came up and shook my hand last week after his class.,and thanked me.
We had announced it was my last day, I had been there 3 months mentoring his new teacher.
It made quite an impression on me!
It reminds me of a promise I made to former students,
to tell the world what is wrong with kids today:
The answer is NOTHING! They are as wonderful as they have ever been
(some people just don't know where/how to look!)
Keep up the good work!"
"This is going to sound weird, but whenever I buy a slushie at lunch at school, the lady who operates the machine tells me about how I "have such a pretty smile".
It makes my day, strange as it is."
Pic from Grant Hamilton
Very interested in the emo music scene, I found an article in The Sunday Times Culture Magazine enlightening. The Plain White T's from America have inspired several new emo acts in the UK. The T's are described as 'a melodic product of the tormented, introverted American version of indie know as "emo" - because the songs are so emotional.'
The article was interesting on many levels, not least because it was so full of stereotyped descriptions about people's attitudes. One example is that 'Barry', the new emo character introduced into Hollyoaks last year, is described as, 'You can tell Barry is an emo kid because he is sulky and sensitive, and nobody understands him'.
Perhaps what they should have observed is that he is probably an emo because he 'has to be' like that all the time, rather than just some of the time like the rest of us.
And the really fascinating thing bit about many music related stereotypes is that you are often required to adopt the 'mood' of the genre almost permanently to be taken seriously. Depression is almost like a fashion accessory, a look, something you put on in the morning, like a shirt. Many teenagers of course have some depression symptoms naturally, but adopting a music stereotype which encourages it further can prolong or reinforce it.
As Tom Higgenson, Plain White T's singer explains: "That's what songs should be about. Heartbreak and nostalgia. Music these days is all, 'You're hot, I'm at the club, let's get together, baby', but I think the British have always loved good melodic songs about heartbreak." He is probably right, but not all day every day, at least not if we wish to preserve our mental health.
Music is fantastic for helping you change and lift your mood, or even to match a somber one.... but the idea of matching one's mood to a BRAND.... permantently... seems a little strange?
If you have a chance do watch short 12 minute film on mirror neurons. You will see that studies have shown that facial expressions not only represent our inner emotions, but that wearing particular facial expressions can create a matching inner feeling.... i.e. if you make your face sad deliberately, then you will begin to feel sad. If don't know how emotions work physiologically this is a really easy thing to fall into without even realising it, and it is perhaps as negative as the media distorting our view of healthy bodies.
Nicola Brown, feature's editor at Kerrang! says, "I am worried that the mainstream attention might kill the scene completely....It's got a lot in common with grunge, in that the bands and the fans are sharply critical of selling out. I mean, if you've got emo characters in soap operas, it's not a good sign. That's not the sort of thing that the people who like emo want to identify with."
I wonder what counts as selling out?
Why do I have the sudden urge to wear pink . . and blow bubbles?
Welcome to Collaborate, the Social Spaces community blog. Collaborate incorporates over 1,000 Thriving Too blog posts that we have written over the last 4 1/2 years, and continues to aim shamelessly to prove the case for optimism by revealing and promoting the explosion in positive actions from around the world. This blog is also used to question, think out loud, stimulate conversation, sometimes cause an argument, tentatively share early ideas ... and wrestle publicly together with the complex ideas and challenges that are shaping the future.
The Social Spaces project aims to transform society at community level through surfacing new emergent knowledge, using a transdisciplinary approach to analyse and understand that knowledge, and developing innovative approaches to spread these new ideas and methods.
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