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Brain science to improve your relationships - Harvard Health Blog
Emotional contagion
Our emotions can be easily transferred to another person without us even knowing about this. This can also happen through large-scale social networks without in-person interactions or nonverbal cues. Our negative emotions such as anger are transferred more easily than positive ones.
What you can do: Be aware when your partner or colleague “makes” you angry. You may not actually be angry with them, but instead, mistaking their anger for yours when your brain reflects their feeling states.
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Key Ideas
Emotional intelligence
It is the ability to manage our own emotions and react to the emotions of others.
People who exhibit emotional intelligence have the less obvious skills necessary to get ahead in life, such as managing conflict resolution, reading and responding to the needs of others, and keeping their own emotions from overflowing and disrupting their lives.
5 key areas of emotional intelligence
- Self-awareness: it involves knowing your own feelings.
- Self-management: it involves being able to keep your emotions in check when they become disruptive.
- Motivation, for the sake of personal joy, curiosity or the satisfaction of being productive.
- Empathy: the skill and practice of reading the emotions of others and responding appropriately.
- Social skills: this can include finding common ground with others, managing others in a work environment and being persuasive.
Improving self-awareness
- Keep a journal of your emotions. At the end of every day, write down what happened to you, how you felt, and how you dealt with it.
- Ask for input from people who know you well about where your strengths and weaknesses lie, to gauge your perception from another’s point of view.
- Slow down (or meditate). The next time you have an emotional reaction to something, try to pause before you react.
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Relationship Advice From Counter-Terrorism Experts
According to leading counter-terrorism experts, the same methods that aid communication and co-operation with terrorists and criminal suspects can be applied at home and work to solve relationship issues.
As people turn hostile, and the conversation gets harder, the techniques usually used for gaining the trust and co-operation of violent criminals start to work on our loved ones.
Reverse Psychology
- The more we push someone to do something, the more they resist and rebel.
- The more urgently we need information from someone, the harder it could get for us to get it out of a person.
- Building rapport, and providing autonomy to the person help thaw out the relationship and get things moving.
Forming A Connection
- With the help of the right communication, attitude and gestures, a rapport can be formed with the other person (like a teenager or a spouse).
- The power balance needs to be restored/shared, so the person who is ‘closed’ finds a reason to open up.
- Threatening, blackmailing and trickery rarely work in such situations, with a humble, submissive and empathetic person having a much better chance at being effective.
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Key Ideas
Emotions
They are basal responses that begin in the subcortical areas of the brain responsible for producing biochemical reactions to environmental stimuli that have a direct impact on our physical state.
Coded into our DNA, emotions help us respond quickly to threats, like our ‘fight or flight’ response. Also, they can often be measured objectively through physical cues such as blood flow, heart rate, brain activity, facial expressions, and body language.
Feelings
Feelings are preceded by emotions and tend to be our reactions to them. Emotions are a more generalized experience across humans, but feelings are more subjective and influenced by our personal experiences and interpretations, thus they are harder to measure.
Negative Emotions
They can be defined as unpleasant or unhappy emotions evoked in individuals to express a negative effect towards something.
Although some are labeled negative, all emotions are normal to the human experience. And it’s important to understand when and why negative emotions might arise, and develop positive behaviors to address them.