Liz has a gift for intuitively sensing other people’s feelings. She always waits for the right moment to ask a question and knows when her counterpart is not in the mood for discussion. Liz has strong social intuition. Others have a good sense of their own inner life; they are self-aware, very self-aware. Still others are particularly good at overcoming adversity: they are resilient. But no one is just resilient, self-aware, or socially intuitive. Rather, there are six characteristics that are more or less characteristic of a person’s emotional style.
Our individual emotional profile consists of six dimensions: resilience, social intuition, self-awareness, a tendency toward positive or negative emotions, contextual sensitivity, and attentiveness. Each dimension forms a continuum with two poles, such as “bounces back quickly” or “bounces back slowly” on the resilience dimension. Positions on the six dimensions indicate how one sees and responds to the world. Style is like a painter’s palette: everyone has their own unique blend that determines how our lives are colored.
One of the first scientific models of the key characteristics that define us as human beings came from brain researcher Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His model is original in that it is based on the way the brain works. He has spent decades studying emotions using neuroscientific methods. The dimensions he has identified are all linked to specific neural networks and corresponding neurophysiological building blocks of our personality. In other words, they are more easily linked to biological functions than traditional personality models.
Davidson came up with the concept of resilience after observing that people who take different amounts of time to recover from adversity also differ in their brain activity. In a laboratory experiment, he induced unpleasant feelings in his subjects by showing them disturbing images, such as a baby with a tumor on its eye. He then measured how quickly they recovered by observing the startle response of the eye.
What the blink of an eye reveals
To do this, Davidson unexpectedly played a sound to the test subjects that caused them to reflexively blink their eyelashes the first time they heard it – a kind of surprise effect. The more negative the person’s emotional state, whether fear, anger or sadness, the stronger the blink response. The strength of the muscle contraction is a measure of a person’s emotional state. Davidson measured not only the muscle contraction in the eye when he surprised his subjects with sounds, but also their brain activity.
The result: Those who recovered quickly from the unpleasant images showed more activity in the left prefrontal cortex.
What is special about this region is that it is closely intertwined with virtually the entire rest of the brain, and thus has the ability to either inhibit or activate many other regions. Further experiments showed that in resilient people, this area of the cerebral cortex is closely connected to the amygdala, which is particularly active during fear and other negative emotions. In resilient people, unpleasant feelings fade so quickly because their left frontal lobe is very active and can quickly calm the amygdala.
In the course of his laboratory experiments, Davidson discovered other dimensions to our emotional profile. When he studied depression, for example, he looked at the neural network that underlies our ability to feel positive. People with depression are particularly deficient in this ability. In one experiment, he showed subjects movies of children playing or of delicious food to induce unpleasant feelings. The participants were asked to try to make the positive feelings last, for example by imagining themselves in the movie. At the same time, their brain activity
Davidson observed an anomaly in the activation of the nucleus accumbens, a core area in the brain’s reward system. When depressed subjects watched pleasant movie scenes, the area was initially activated in the same way as in healthy subjects, but the activity faded more quickly. Normally, the frontal lobe ensures that a pleasurable experience lasts for a while. So people with depression are able to feel positive emotions, but they fade quickly. Their reward system is only briefly activated because it is not sufficiently connected to the frontal lobe. So the two brain regions are more connected and active in one person and less so in another. This means that good feelings last longer or shorter in one person and shorter in another.
Where social sensitivity comes from
Davidson based his concept of social sensitivity on observations of people with autism. These individuals have difficulty perceiving the feelings of others and interpreting nonverbal cues. The psychologist showed that looking at portrait photos triggered relatively little activity in a brain area that is normally activated when looking at faces, the fusiform gyrus. It gives us crucial information about other people’s emotions: Are they smiling? Do they look surprised? Or do they look sad? We know this, among other things, thanks to the fusiform gyrus.
At the same time, the amygdalae of people with autism are hyperactive when they look into another person’s eyes because it causes them anxiety and discomfort. So they try to avoid it, which means they miss out on information about their counterpart’s emotional state. These and other findings led Davidson to the idea that the ability to read emotions in faces is rooted in a neural network:
The more active the fusiform gyrus and the quieter the amygdalae, the easier it is for us to decode a face’s expression. In other words, we are more socially aware.
After decades of research, Davidson had identified all the dimensions that he believed made up a person’s emotional style: in addition to the three characteristics described and explained in more detail, these include self-awareness, context sensitivity, and attention. The latter appears to be an outlier. But he found that the more emotionally significant an external event is to us, the more it distracts us. If you can’t focus your attention well, every crying child and cute kitten will interrupt your activities and throw you into a state of sadness and joy. How we focus our attention and how we respond emotionally to the world around us are related.
Davidson also concluded from his research that the prefrontal cortex plays a key role in our emotional profile. He observed that activity in the frontal lobe can vary by a factor of 30 from person to person. No wonder people are so different.
But how can you assess your own emotional style if you don’t have access to a brain research lab? Even a few simple questions, such as those summarized in the Emotional Style Questionnaire, can help you create your own profile. This can be the first step toward accepting yourself for who you are – or maybe not. If you are unhappy with some of your idiosyncrasies, for example, if you think you are too sensitive, too clumsy, or too absent-minded, it can be comforting to recognize and understand the causes and how they relate to the idiosyncrasies of your brain.
Find out what works for you
Self-awareness can also help you ask the right questions. What makes me happy? What kind of work is right for me? Should I change anything in my life? Those who are less resilient and more prone to negative emotions (which is often associated with a lack of motivation) should avoid jobs where you are constantly under pressure. And those who lack social skills should think twice before applying for a job in sales.
Knowing yourself will help you find the right environment for you. It is also not a good idea to avoid challenges. Even if you know that you have little resilience and that it takes you a long time to get over critical comments from your boss, it is not a solution to run for the exit when you see him. Many studies show that avoiding confrontation with your own fears perpetuates them or even makes them worse.
There is no such thing as an “ideal” emotional profile; everyone has their pros and cons. Highly resilient people deal well with setbacks. But those who have never been devastated may not feel the need to keep trying. And those who misbehave are quickly dismissed as louts. On the other hand, people who can adapt perfectly to any situation may seem less authentic. They are inhibited by their desire to behave optimally, whether at a business meeting or when visiting their mother-in-law. And even if a life as a curmudgeon doesn’t seem particularly desirable, some people are perfectly happy with their negative attitude, because to them optimism is nothing more than a sign of naivety. Everyone can be guided by their own feelings and decide how they want to live their lives.
And everyone can change. Just because the emotional profile is rooted in neural circuitry does not mean it is unchangeable. The brain is malleable and capable of reorganizing itself throughout life. This neuroplasticity determines the extent to which we can change. When it comes to our emotional style, it is no different from the rest of our personality: we need to know ourselves in order to make the most of our possibilities.