You don’t need to know exactly what something is to know that it may be dangerous- LeDoux

The thinking brain plays an executive role in our emotions, except in those moments when emotions surge out of control and the emotional brain runs rampant

Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life

At best, IQ contributes 20% to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80% to other forces, which ranging feom social class to luck

Emotional intelligence, abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustration, to control impulse and delay gratification, to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think, to emphatize and to hope

Childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustration, control emotions, and get on with other people made the greater differences

Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them.

Personal intelligences:
Knowing one’s emotion. People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from who to marry to what job to take
Managing emotions
Motivating oneself. Delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness
Recognizing emotions in others
Handling relationships

The awareness of emotions is the fundamental emotional competence on which others, such as emotional self control, build

People with self awareness don’t ruminate and obsess about bad mood, and able to get out of it sooner

Accepting your moods may works better than trying to change them

Alexithymic patient have no words for feelings, which means not making the feelings your own

A life without passion would be a dull wasteland of neutrality, cut off and isolated from the richness of life itself

Reframing a situation more positively was one of the mosf potent ways to put anger to rest

It’s hard to stay angry when we are having a pleasant time

Use self awareness to catch cynical or hostile thoughts as they arise, and write them down

When fear triggers the emotional brain, part of the resulting anxiety fixates attention on the threat at hand, forcing the mind to obsess about how to handle it and ignore anything else for the time being

People also learn relaxation methods that they can apply at the moment they recognize the worry beginning, and practice the relaxation method daily so they will be able to use it on the spot, when they need it the most

When a worry is allowed to repeat over and over unchallenged, it gains persuasive power, challenging it by contemplating a range of equally plausible points of view keeps the one worried thought from being naively taken as true

People who are already depressed need to make a special effort to get their attention om something that is completely upbeat, being careful not to inadvertently choose something that will drag their mood down again

Approach to mood lifting: small triumph or easy success, tackling some long delayed chore around the house or getting to some other duty you’ve been wanting to clear up

Worry is the nub of anxiety’s damaging effect in mental performance of all kind

Laughing seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely

Students with high hope set themselves higher goals and know how to work hard to attain them

People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so they can succeed next time around

While the pessimist’s mental set leads to despair, the optimist’s spawns hope

People who have sense of efficacy bounce back from failures, they approach things in terms of how to handle fhem rather than worrying about what can go wrong

Flow is a state of forgetfulness. The opposite of rumination and worry

Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety

You learn your best when you have something you care about and you can get pleasure from being engaged in

Relationships throughout life, continually reshape your working model of relationships

Psychopaths lack concern about future punishment for what they do. And because fhey don’t feel fear, they have no empathy or compassion for the fear and pain of their victims

We unconsciously imitate the emotions we see displayed by someone else, through facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, etc

What matters most for whether a child is accepted or not is how well he or she is able to emter into the group’s frame of reference, sensing what kind of play is in flow, what out of place. Two reasons for rejection sre trying to take the lead too soon and being out of sync with the frame of reference

Mother displays a wider range of emotioms fo daughters than to sons, they discuss in more detail the emotional state of feelings. With the sons they go into more detail about the causes and consequences of emotions

Simply having reached and agreement about how to disagree is key to marital survival

Once distressing thoughts such as righteous indignation become automatic, they are self confirming

Partners who take fhe pessimistic stance are extremely prone to emotional hijacking, they get angry, hurt, distressed by things their spouses do, and they stay disturbed omce the episode begins

For men, realize that when their wife brings up some grievance or disagreement, she may be doing it as an act of love. It’s more important to a wife that she feel her husband hears her complaint and emphatizes with her feelings about the matter

Wives need to make a purposeful effort to be careful not to attack their husband, to complain about what they did, not as a person

Couples in marriages that last tend to stick to one topic and to give each partner the chance to state their point of view at the outset

Formula for complain is XYZ. When you did x. It made me feel y, and. I’d rather you did z instead

Too often people criticize only when things boil over, when they get too angry to contain themselves.

Art of praise in criticism:
Be specific
Offer a solution
Be present
Be sensitive

See criticism as valuable information about how to do better, not as a personal attack

Prejudices are a kind of emotional learning that occurs early in life, making these rezctions especially hard to eradicate entirely, even in people who as adults feel it is wrong to hold them

When people in a group heard someone make ethnic slurs, it leds others fo do the same

People who experienced chronic anxiety, long periods of sadness and pessimism, unremitting tension or incessant hostility, relentless cynicism or suspiciousness, were found to have double risk of disease

Isolation is as significant to mortality rates as smoking, hypertension, high cholesterol, obesity, lack of exercise

It’s the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in dpand day out, that seem crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health

Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings is a form of disease prevention

Many patients can benefit measurably when their psychological needs are attended to along with their purely medical ones

What is perhaps most troubling about the abused toddlers is how early they seem to have learned ro respond like miniature versions of their own abusive parents

When animals are exposed to mild stress when young, they were far more vulnerable than unstressed animals to trauma induced brain changes later in life

Steps to recovery from trauma:
Attaining sense of safety
Remembering the details od fhe trauma
Mourning the loss it has brought
Reestablishing normal life

Emotional learning is lifelong. It could be changed

People who have greater activity in the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, sre by temperament cheerful, they typically delight in people and in what life presents them with, bouncing back from setbacks.

The protective beliefs of parents seems to have abetted the fearfulness, probably by depriving rhe youngsters of opportunities for learning how to overcome their fears

Habits aquired in childhood become set in the basic synaptic wiring of neural architecture, and are harder to change later in life

Where usual children have started fo learn negotiation and compromise for playground disagreements, the bullies rely more and more on force and bluster

The antisocial act od five year old may be prototypic of the acts of the delinquent adolescent

Depression interferes with their memories and concentration

Those who saw rejection as due to some flaw in themselves grew more depressed

In later stages of life people who have few friends and are chronically lonely are at greater risk for medical diseases and an early death

What typically escalates to conflicts begins with not communicating, making assumptions, and jumping to conclusions, sending a hard message in ways that make it tough for people to hear what you are saying

We learn that we always have choices about how we respond to emotiom, and the more ways you know to respond to an emotion, the richer your life can be

Schoolyard bipullies often strike out in anger because they misinterpret neutral messages and expressions as hostile, and girls who develop eating disorder fail ro distinguish anger from anxiety from hunger

Assess situation with SOCS model. Situation, option, consequence, solutions

Emotional awareness:
Improvement in recognizinf and naming own emotions
Better able to understand the causes of feelings
Recognizing the difference between feelings and action