Emotional inteligence
422/661to help her up, and as I did so, instead of complaining orlamenting she laughed at her predicament. Her onlycomment was a lighthearted "Well, at least I can walkagain."By nature, some people's emotions seem, like myaunt's, to gravitate toward the positive pole; thesepeople are naturally upbeat and easygoing, while othersare dour and melancholy. This dimension of temperament—ebullienceat one end, melancholy at the other—seemslinked to the relative activity of the right andleft prefrontal areas, the upper poles of the emotionalbrain. That insight has emerged largely from the work ofRichard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist.He discovered that people who have greater activityin the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are bytemperament cheerful; they typically take delight inpeople and in what life presents them with, bouncingback from setbacks as my aunt June did. But those withrelatively greater activity on the right side are given tonegativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life'sdifficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because theycannot turn off their worries and depressions.In one of Davidson's experiments volunteers with themost pronounced activity in the left frontal areas werecompared with the fifteen who showed most activity onthe right. Those with marked right frontal activity
423/661showed a distinctive pattern of negativity on a personalitytest: they fit the caricature portrayed by WoodyAllen's comedy roles, the alarmist who sees catastrophein the smallest thing—prone to funks and moodiness,and suspicious of a world they saw as fraught with overwhelmingdifficulties and lurking dangers. By contrastto their melancholy counterparts, those with strongerleft frontal activity saw the world very differently. Sociableand cheerful, they typically felt a sense of enjoyment,were frequently in good moods, had a strongsense of self-confidence, and felt rewardingly engaged inlife. Their scores on psychological tests suggested alower lifetime risk for depression and other emotionaldisorders. 6People who have a history of clinical depression,Davidson found, had lower levels of brain activity in theleft frontal lobe, and more on the right, than did peoplewho had never been depressed. He found the same patternin patients newly diagnosed with depression.Davidson speculates that people who overcome depressionhave learned to increase the level of activity in theirleft prefrontal lobe—a speculation awaiting experimentaltesting.Though his research is on the 30 percent or so ofpeople at the extremes, just about anyone can be classifiedby their brain wave patterns as tending toward one
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- Page 388 and 389: endured semistarvation, the slaught
- Page 390 and 391: 390/661overwhelming terror. 4 While
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- Page 418 and 419: 418/661five infants falls into the
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to help her up, and as I did so, instead of complaining or
lamenting she laughed at her predicament. Her only
comment was a lighthearted "Well, at least I can walk
again."
By nature, some people's emotions seem, like my
aunt's, to gravitate toward the positive pole; these
people are naturally upbeat and easygoing, while others
are dour and melancholy. This dimension of temperament—ebullience
at one end, melancholy at the other—seems
linked to the relative activity of the right and
left prefrontal areas, the upper poles of the emotional
brain. That insight has emerged largely from the work of
Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist.
He discovered that people who have greater activity
in the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are by
temperament cheerful; they typically take delight in
people and in what life presents them with, bouncing
back from setbacks as my aunt June did. But those with
relatively greater activity on the right side are given to
negativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life's
difficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because they
cannot turn off their worries and depressions.
In one of Davidson's experiments volunteers with the
most pronounced activity in the left frontal areas were
compared with the fifteen who showed most activity on
the right. Those with marked right frontal activity