KEEP YOUR COOL

"Did you hear the way they were yelling at each other? Did you see how they became red in the face?" These are questions that you might try to answer when you witness arguments. It seems that people can get so emotional they might go out of control. But the fact of the matter is that most of the time they don't end up punching each other. The more important question is "Why don't they punch each other?" 

Theories about emotions reach back at least to the time of the ancient Greek philosophers; and, there is still no simple explanation of an emotion. However, it is considered a very complex interaction of one's physical and mental activity. Given this feeble explanation, we can readily see what a challenge it is for us to maintain a healthy outlook in life. After all, we do have happy and unhappy situations that provide us with strong feelings—emotions.

Psychology over the years has presented numerous theories to describe what causes emotional behavior. The field of neuroscience (the study of the nervous system) has emerged in the 21^st century and has made advances in helping us understand emotions. Dr. Richard J. Davidson, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a pioneer in brain research for more than thirty years. In his recent book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, Penguin Books, 2012, he introduces Emotional Styles for helping us learn how to deal with our emotions.

Richardson claims that each person has unique emotional styles, which consist of six distinct components:
1. Resilience (how rapidly we recover from negative emotions),
2. Outlook (the duration of positive feelings),
3. Context (the degree to which we adapt our emotional responses. 
    For example, you won't talk to your employer the same way you would to your spouse),
4. Social Intuition (your sensitivity to people's facial and verbal expressions; your ability to
    empathize with their emotions),
5. Self Awareness (the degree you are aware of your emotional signals), 
6. Attention (how focused or distracted your mind is).

What makes his research interesting is that he has, through studying brain images, been able to show that there is a definite interrelation between the thinking part of the brain and the part of the brain that plays an important role in our negative emotions, such as stress, fear or anxiety. He discovered that the more connections between these two parts of the brain, the better we are able to manage our emotions. Fewer connections make it more difficult for one to recover quickly, thus, people linger longer in a negative emotion. Formerly, neuroscientists considered emotions mainly controlled by the part of the brain that reacts to stress and fear.

The evidence of his research shows that the brain is now known to have neuroplasticity, the ability to change its structure and function. We can learn to control and manage our emotions by applying the components of emotional styles. You can

 "Keep Your Cool".