How long does it take to Read a Person’s Emotions?

Psychology professor William Ickes found that our ability to read strangers during a six-minute interaction is limited, but other experiments showed that we have much greater accuracy when reading our friends’ behavior. That’s not really shocking, but what is surprising is that when study subjects spent just a little more time with a stranger, their ability to read that person was just as good as their ability to read close friends. The magic time span? Thirty minutes. Time, or at least the amount of information acquired over time, is crucial to empathy. That is not only the case for real-life encounters, but also for stories.

Lene Bech Sillesen writing in the Columbia Journalism Review

The best strategy for persuading others to help you achieve something

Let's say you're considering a wonderful business opportunity, but you also face challenges.

The average leader might gather the team and explain why it's such a great opportunity for the company. The emotionally intelligent leader, however, skips much of that, and frames everything from the point of view of his or her team:

1. First, what the opportunity means for everyone together,

2. Second, what it means for individual contributors, and

3. Finally, what's needed from each person to reach the goal.

The hard part is that it takes more time to think about all of these angles and to craft the right message. On top of all of that, you have the challenge of being brief. But, when done right, you also get the benefit of being far more likely to achieve your goals.

Bill Murphy, Jr. writing in his newsletter

The Most Effective Therapeutic Approach to Serious Emotional Issues

We are on a road to significant life disruptions when we cling to what we wish the world was like instead of what it really is like. As M Scott Peck wrote, “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” 

Like it or not, we are all neurotic to some degree. If the wrong set of circumstances comes along, and if they are combined with unhealthy attitudes encouraged by poor parenting and genetic tenancies, any of us can tip over into the abyss. 

Mental clarity is fundamental to emotional health. That's why, despite the biological component of mental illness, our therapeutic approaches should be holistic and address cognitive issues. A cognitive-focused approach has a history of greater effectiveness than drugs (except when dealing with extreme psychotic breaks, schizophrenia, etc.). After an initial physical exam rules out disease and general illness, an eclectic approach that is focused on cognitive therapy is the most effective direction. For most issues, drugs are best regulated to use as a tool allowing a person to find a place of stability in order to deal with fundamental unhealthy cognitive issues.

Stephen Goforth

Two kinds of Coping Strategies

Psychologists like to group coping strategies into two main types: emotion-focused and problem-focused. Emotion-focused strategies change the way we feel, like distracting ourselves, getting support from friends, or looking at the situation from a different perspective. Problem-focused strategies, on the other hand, involve taking action to solve the problem directly.

No one strategy works all the time, and you’ll often see people get stuck in their favorite way of coping. If you tend toward distraction and denial, you might avoid dealing with a problem that you actually could have solved; if you’re an inveterate problem-solver, you might feel helpless and angry when confronting a problem—or a loved one’s—that has no solution, when all that’s really needed is support and connection. 

Kira Newman writing in Greater Good

If you go to bed angry

If you go to sleep after a fight with someone, you may “preserve” those emotions. That’s the finding of researchers at the University of Massachusetts. Scientists showed images (some positive, some negative) to more than 100 people and checked 12 hours later to see which pictures stuck with the subjects. The response changed depending as to whether the person had slept during the 12-hour break or not. Sleeping seemed to protect the emotional response. You can read the details in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Other studies have also support the idea that sleep enhances emotional memories. If you have difficulty sleeping after an upsetting day, it could be your mind’s way of trying to avoid storing that memory. It’s a reminder of the Bible verse that reads, “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Eph. 4:26).

Stephen Goforth

The Problem of Mindfulness

It’s often pragmatically useful to step away from your own fraught ruminations and emotions. Seeing them as drifting leaves can help us gain a certain distance from the heat of our feelings, so as to discern patterns and identify triggers. But after a certain point, mindfulness doesn’t allow you to take responsibility for and analyse such feelings. It’s not much help in sifting through competing explanations for why you might be thinking or feeling a certain way. Nor can it clarify what these thoughts and feelings might reveal about your character. Mindfulness, grounded in anattā, can offer only the platitude: ‘I am not my feelings.’ Its conceptual toolbox doesn’t allow for more confronting statements, such as ‘I am feeling insecure,’ ‘These are my anxious feelings,’ or even ‘I might be a neurotic person.’ Without some ownership of one’s feelings and thoughts, it is difficult to take responsibility for them.

Sahanika Ratnayake writing in Aeon

Inbuilt gullibility

Fake news may be exacerbating people’s inbuilt gullibility. A study published last year in Science, a journal, concluded that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth” and that this effect was especially strong for fake political news. Fake news provides voters with a smorgasbord of facts and lies from which to pick and choose.

ln 2004 Drew Westen of Emory University in Atlanta put partisan Republicans and Democrats into a magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner and found that lying or hypocrisy by the other side lit up areas of the brain associated with rewards; lies by their own side lit up areas associated with dislike and negative emotions. At no point did the parts of the brain associated with reason show any response at all. If voters’ judgments are rooted in emotion and intuition, facts and evidence are likely to be secondary.

The Economist 

A one-way ticket to a toxic relationship

Many people are addicted to the ups and downs of romantic love. They are in it for the feels, so to speak. And when the feels run out, so do they. Many people get into a relationship as a way to compensate for something they lack or hate within themselves. This is a one-way ticket to a toxic relationship because it makes your love conditional — you will love your partner as long as they help you feel better about yourself. You will give to them as long as they give to you. You will make them happy as long as they make you happy.  This conditionality prevents any true, deep-level intimacy from emerging and chains the relationship to the bucking throes of each person’s internal dramas.

Mark Manson

The Paradox of Emotions

“A desire (or emotion) is turned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes all its character to its object.. It is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarse or choice, ‘high’ or ‘low.’ It is the object that makes the desire itself desirable or hateful.”

Those words were penned by CS Lewis.

In other words, if you want to love your wife then concentrate--not on love--but on her.

If you wish more faith in God, do not concentrate on faith. Focus on God.

Stephen Goforth

Painting your Internal World

Therapists often run into a curious problem during treatment: Clients aren’t very good at describing their emotions. How exactly do you express the nature of your depression? So this spring, relationship counselor Crystal Rice hit upon a clever idea. She had her clients use Pinterest, the popular picture-pinning social network, to create arrays of images that map out their feelings. It’s a brilliant epiphany: While emotions can be devilishly difficult to convey in words, they’re often very accessible via pictures. “This way we can really identify what’s going on,” Rice says.

As Rice discovered with her clients, Pinterest’s appeal is that it gives us curiously powerful visual ways to communicate, think, and remember. If you see one picture of a guitar, it’s just a guitar; but when you see 80 of them lined up you start to see guitarness. This additive power is precisely what helps Rice’s clients paint their internal worlds.

Part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination.

Granted, Pinterest encourages plenty of dubious behavior too. It can be grindingly materialistic; all those pins of stuff to buy! Marketers are predictably adrool, and as they swarm aboard, the whole service might very well end up collapsing into a heap of product shilling.

But I suspect we’ll see increasingly odd and clever ways of using Pinterest. If a picture is worth a thousand words, those collections are worth millions.

Clive Thompson, Wired Magazine

wobbly furniture

Craving emotional stability? Then start by fixing your shaky chair. A Canadian study found a connection between sitting in a wobbly chair and assumptions about judging relationships.

University of Waterloo Researchers divided volunteers into two groups. The group sitting in shaky furniture not only saw instability in the relationships of others but also said that they valued stability in their own relationships more highly. The researchers’ conclusion: Even a small amount of environmental wobbliness will encourage a desire for emotional balance and security.

Details of the study were published in the journal Psychological Science.

Stephen Goforth

Painful Memories

If you suffer from great, recurring anger, the cause could be painful memories, rooted in childhood. Charles Dickens said, “Injustice is the most painful hurt in childhood”. All of us remember times, especially in our youth, when we were "done wrong." Healing from this is a process that can take a great deal of time. It also takes reprogramming our thought patterns, so we don't react to current situations as if they are part of past injustices. Don’t stuff the past down. Are you on the road to healing? Are you a little further along today than you were yesterday? Life is not about having arrived, but “becoming.”

Stephen Goforth

Dealing with a moody man

Men are rewarded in our society for ignoring their feelings, except for anger. When emotions overwhelm a man and tightly wrap around his gut, he certainly knows something is wrong--but he will struggle if he attempts to label those feelings or articulate the cause--especially when the emotions are still in play. Lacking control, he looks down on himself with disdain because he believes it's a flaw to be a man without control. As that tight ball of emotion begins to uncurl and subside, as he feels that he's gaining mastery of himself once again, he has the opportunity to gain a handle on defining the emotion he is experiencing.

But if a partner puts a spotlight on those emotions, while he's in that uncomfortable place, the man may try to hide even more. He's not in control of himself and thinks he should be. The spotlight makes that all the more obvious.  If she can restrain herself, it's possible to slowly draw the emotion-averse man out of his cave by building his confidence... by encouraging him to believe that he is able to handle the uncertainty. The passage of time, emotional space, and distractions often provide healing for him... and perspective.

Before the man moves completely away from that raw sensation in his gut, there's a brief period of realization where he can catch an authentic glimpse of himself and his emotional limitations. In that moment he can catch a glimpse of who he is--or go right back to repeat the cycle.

Stephen Goforth