What's New
Every week we publish new articles and add books to the library. Here's everything that landed this week.
How emotional intelligence is actually developed in adults and not from reading about it but from what the research supports
Understanding emotional intelligence is not the same as developing it — and most EI training is built on that confusion.
Buddha's Brain
Rick Hanson
Buddha's Brain by Rick Hanson. Where Siegel provides the clinical and relational neuroscience of EI development, Hanson addresses the specific neural mechanism through which repeated practice produces structural change: the Hebbian learning principle that neurons that fire together wire together, applied to the deliberate cultivation of the mental states that EI requires. His account of how the brain's negativity bias, the evolved tendency to weight negative experience more heavily than positive, creates the default neural patterns that EI development is working against, and how deliberate practice of specific mental states can gradually shift the baseline, is the most practically applicable description of why the development work is slow and why consistency matters more than intensity. His guided practices for cultivating the neural states associated with positive affect, interpersonal attunement, and regulatory capacity are the most directly usable complement to the research this article covers.
How emotional intelligence is actually developed in adults and not from reading about it but from what the research supports
Understanding emotional intelligence is not the same as developing it — and most EI training is built on that confusion.
The limits of emotional intelligence and what it predicts well and what it has been oversold as predicting
The research on emotional intelligence is genuinely interesting. The popular account of that research is significantly more confident…
Emotional intelligence under pressure and why EQ that works in calm conditions often disappears when it is most needed
The conditions that most require emotional intelligence are precisely the conditions that make it hardest to access.
The body's role in emotional intelligence and why somatic awareness is the foundation most EI training ignores
Most emotional intelligence training begins at the cognitive level — which is to say, it begins in the middle.
Empathy and its varieties: the difference between understanding another person's perspective and what is actually needed in professional relationships
Empathy is not one thing — and the variety that costs the most is often the least commercially…
The gap between feeling and response: what happens in the space between an emotional trigger and a chosen action
Between what activates you and what you do next, there is a space — and everything turns on…
Emotional recognition: why accurately identifying what you are feeling is harder than it appears and why it matters
The capacity that everything else in emotional intelligence depends on is the one most people assume they already have.
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