Thursday, May 28, 2009

The Other Kind of Smart

"What they call 'social and emotional knowledge' – the ability to read other people, manage our own emotions and thereby master social situations – doesn't have to be imparted solely through the cut and thrust of lived life. It can be taught, they say, like trigonometry or French grammar." - Drake Bennett, Dallas Morning News, May 3, 2009.

One of the ideas to which I'm irrationally attached is that our program of compulsory education (K-12) should contain more psychology. More specifically, students should be taught more about human behavior and motivation, child development, and critical reasoning and reasoning errors. In an idealistic way (that probably comes from my own passion to understand the human mind), I think that we could turn out more thoughtful, emotionally-aware graduates - who are better prepared for the challenges of adult relationships, responsibilities, and parenting - by adding some basic psychology and applied critical thinking to the average school curriculum.

So I was pleased to see Bennett's recent opinion piece, which expresses part of that sentiment. Bennett's piece is more well-researched than anything I've ever put together, and he does a good job of pulling together both pro and con arguments for teaching social and emotional knowledge skills in schools. Interestingly, one of the arguments against teaching emotional awareness is that "[i]f you know how to understand and manipulate other people's emotions, it can turn into something Machiavellian" - a quote attributed to Moshe Zeidner, co-author of What We Know About Emotional Intelligence. I'm going to take just a moment to share my semi-formal gut-reaction protest of that idea - 'And do you really think ignorance might be a better alternative?'

From a humanist perspective, don't we need to understand more about what our flaws are and how they hamper us, in order to overcome them without relying on supernatural imperatives about what is right and wrong? If I have a better understanding of you and what motivates you, and if I have cultivated the ability to have empathy toward you, am I more or less likely to misunderstand you? Assuming that misunderstandings and the inability to empathize drive a good portion of our ugliness toward our fellow man, shouldn't we be looking for opportunities to cultivate better social and emotional awareness in ourselves and in our children?

Before I start thumping the pulpit too hard, let me back down and point out one of the more compelling con arguments that Bennett mentions - the idea that we might unintentionally be creating a type of emotional conformity about what emotions are 'right' or 'wrong'. Anything that is systematized for mass consumption is likely going to backfire in some way. Would we be indirectly reinforcing ideas about certain emotions being 'bad'? Would this lead to an increased desire to suppress those emotions, via psychopharmocology or other artificial means? And what would be the ultimate cost of that?

Whatever your opinion about what might happen if emotional awareness skills were to be taught on a large-scale, the results of such teaching is showing that "emotional-learning classes can make kids better at controlling themselves when upset" and "less likely to assume hostility in ambiguous social situations."

That sounds hopeful and promising.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Compassion Is Difficult

"Make no judgements where you have no compassion."

In the panoply of human virtues, compassion is one of the most highly-espoused by both great religious and secular leaders. It's worth mentioning that compassion is an emotional, physical response to the suffering of others, rather than a simple intellectual knowledge about the suffering and the decision to alleviate it. As such, compassion is something you feel, rather than something you decide to have.

But as with other human emotional virtues - e.g., love - we seldom discuss its obscure psychophysiological origins, or what can prevent us from feeling it. A 24-7 state of loving compassion for one's fellow man sounds 'enlightened' and like something to which we should aspire. However, no human being can sustain prolonged bursts of any emotion without becoming, to some degree, dysfunctional. After all, the function of an emotion is to compete with/overwhelm analytical step-by-step processing in an attempt to convey important information and generate a response. You could reasonably aspire to condition yourself to have a compassionate outlook that governs your behavior, but to want to feel compassion all the time seems undesirable. Such an outlook, though, would be an intellectual response, and subject to being overridden by any other emotion that presents itself.

In order to cultivate more true compassion (the emotional, physical response) we need to understand what triggers a feeling of compassion. Perhaps more importantly though, we should ask when don't we or can't we feel compassion for others? What barriers do we have that prevent us from displaying this virtue?

I relate the following story not because I'm particularly proud of or ashamed of my reaction, but because an honest examination of ourselves and our behaviors is a necessary step in advancing our own ability to behave morally... Yesterday morning I went into the store where I normally purchase a paper and a beverage. Upon entering the store at this early hour, I noticed a man at the cash register next to the entryway. It's unusual that anyone is in this store at this hour, and perhaps my gaze lingered a bit too long. He quickly moved toward me and loudly said 'What's your problem, lady?' By this time I had observed, in addition to the man's unkempt appearance and inappropriate reaction to my presence, that there were several dollar bills lying neatly side by side on the counter. (Aberrant behavior!)

My threat assessment was now telling me that this person was likely drunk and/or mentally-ill and off his medication. His judgment was likely impaired and his reaction to me could likely become more unpredictable/irrational. Had I been safely removed from the potential (however small) of being physically harmed by this person, I probably could have viewed him with compassion. But compassion never entered my mind as a thought or an emotion while this 5-second encounter was playing itself out.

Had I not been thinking about compassion for other reasons, I probably wouldn't have given much thought to this encounter. But I was, and so it occurred to me to wonder why, in spite of my assessment that this person was suffering in some very real sense, I did not/was not able to evoke compassion for him. Is compassion something we can only feel when we ourselves feel safe? Are we so hard-wired for self-preservation that a compassionate reaction to our fellow man can only happen in the absence of a perceived threat to ourselves? This may seem obvious in light of some of the things I discussed earlier, but if it is true, then we need to overtly acknowledge it in order to begin to move beyond it.

I spent a lot of time today thinking about this idea. Sadly, I found that it fits other instances where I have failed to behave compassionately towards other, or towards myself.

So if we then argue that the perception of a threat can keep us from behaving compassionately towards each other, then would reducing the level of threat that we perceive in/from the other allow us to respond more positively/compassionately? Would we default to a compassionate reaction to suffering in the absence of a perceived threat? Or is the absence of threat simply a necessary, but not a sufficient, precursor for a compassionate response?

Monday, May 11, 2009

Embracing a Wide Sky

"Mad Pride is a movement that celebrates the human rights and spectacular culture of people considered very different by our society." - Mindfreedom.org

I've recently noticed a few articles that mention 'Mad Pride'. A Newsweek article spawned a blogpost over at Mindhacks, referencing a New York Times article from a year ago. Today another article appeared which brought the 'mad pride' movement into the limelight.

If you are wodnering what 'mad pride' is, it's been defined as a movement "committed to ending discrimination against psychiatric patients and glorifying madness in all its forms", or more generally, as a movement that celebrates the great range of differences in the human mind.

This movement fascinates me because, had I the wherewithal, I would love to go to law school and, as a lawyer with a Ph.D. in cognitive science, help define the emerging field of cognitive-rights/personhood law. As technology (and psychopharmacology) advance, issues of what is 'normal enough' and what can be mandated to be 'fixed' will only become more common. (You'll probably see a lot of these types of issues discussed in this blog.)

Today it occurred to me to wonder what traditional humanism had to say about mental illness, so I googled 'humanism and mental illness'. I don't know what I expected find - a manifesto of some sort, I guess, that would detail humanism's acceptance of the full range of human mental experience. Nothing of that sort appeared in the top few pages of google results. A paper by Erich Fromm (my favorite humanist philosopher) entitled "The Humanist Concept of Mental Health", (1961) topped the list of results. I've loved everything I've ever read by Erich Fromm, so there will be a blog-writing pause while I read this article...

"What is the normal man, mentally and emotionally speaking? Can he simply be defined as being like the majority? And if the majority is not healthy, would then the individual who is like the majority be a healthy man, or is it possible that the very person who is different from the rest is the healthy one, while the whole society is mad? But is there such a thing as an insane society?" (I love this guy.)

Fromm's paper does not deal with our modern approaches to what we label 'mental illness'. Indeed, he argues for mental health - "Well-being is being in accord with the nature of man." - more than he argues against mental illness, leaving the reader to wonder if he sees any 'goodness' in certain forms of 'madness'. Perhaps there is hope in his parting sentence - "...let us never forget that from the standpoint of the humanist tradition the healthy man is the man who is productive, the man who is related to the world, and concerned with the world, and mental health is never only the absence of illness; it is never only the capacity to function well, but it is a state of mind in which the person is stimulated by the world around him, and hence he can be stimulating to others."

Is this a satisfactory humanist position, particularly if humanism is "a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people" (W)? Or is it important that humanist philosophies take a more pro-active stance to affirm the value of a broader range of mental experiences and a wider sky of human potential? In a time when we are hearing that intelligence drugs could/should be as common as coffee, how important is it for humanist philosophy to support a person's right to reject society's increasing-narrow definition of 'normal', along with the increasing pressure to medicate any deviation from 'normal'?

Here Fromm does not fail us - "man is not made for the state, for the purposes of society, but that the state and society have to serve man." And if "the ultimate goal [of humanism] is human flourishing; making life better for all humans" (W), you may be asking - How does it serve man and society to allow him to function at what we percieve to be a less-than-optimal level?

Think about it. (Better yet, drop comments.) We'll come back to this topic.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Because He Had Life

"Because he had life... He had a chance to be brave and seek the truth, to honor and defend it. He had time in which he could have faced fear and overcome it; to know himself without deceit, excuse, or self-pity; to bear pain without bitterness. He had days in which to laugh, to see beauty, to fill his heart with gratitude. He could have been kind and brave and generous... Above all, there were people he could have loved and learned to forgive."

Why are you behaving this way?, I've often wondered of people I observe. My interest in puzzling out the roots of behavior started many years ago, and continues to this day. Specific behaviors are usually learned, so perhaps a better question is - why/how are you motivated to behave this way?

I've observed over many years that anti-actions (actions which psychologically, emotionally, or physical harm another person) are often a reaction to a perceived threat. The action may be displaced from that actual threat in its target, but the perceived threat that triggered the defensive response usually isn't too hard to find. Conversely, pro-actions (actions which psychologically, emotionally or physically aid another person) are more often seen in situations where the actor is secure in his/her circumstances. This is a fairly-simplistic observation, and one that I am not alone in making.

This leads to the questions - Secure from what? A threat to what? Why do we bother to identify and respond to threats?

When looking at explanations of motivation for behavior, I've been particularly struck by Maslow's proposed Hierarchy of Needs. His elegantly-simple model suggests, for example, that you cannot worry about love, friendship, and respecting others if your basic needs for food and water aren't being met. His model was specifically designed to extend motivating drives into realms beyond the purely physiological, and he declared that certain psychological needs (love, belonging, esteem) were powerful motivators in their own right. In examining motivation, he also acknowledged that motivation may be complex, and that a single motivated behavior may be undertaken to satisfy more than one need. (Perhaps Maslow's most depressing idea though is that "Man is a perpetually wanting animal.", which suggests that we will always be striving for something and will never be completely content.)

As with anything that is beautiful in its simplicity, Maslow's theory often lacks integration with other observations. For example, how the choice of behavior that one engages in to fulfill a particular need is made is not explained by this model. It also does not explain (though it does acknowledge) particular instances of altruism where concern for the safety of a relative may drive one to ignore or suppress one's own basic need for food. It does not explain anticipation of future need-fulfilment, or the various ways in which we identify and process threats to need-fulfilment.

Shaver's observation that those who feel secure are much more likely to engage in pro-actions at cost to themselves is likewise beautifully-simple. What he does not tell us is how we might increase our feeling of security in, what is arguably to many people, a dog-eat-dog world.

Maslow also correctly identifies the importance of feeling secure - "...it is precisely those individuals in whom a certain need has always been satisfied who are best equipped to tolerate deprivation of that need in the future, and that furthermore, those who have been deprived in the past will react differently to current satisfactions than the one who has never been deprived."

The questions then become - At what point, if any, have we acquired a permanent bias in how we see the world and how secure we feel in it? What hope is there for people who chronically engage in anti-actions out of fear? What hope for their children who observe and learn these behaviors? How can we achieve a world where everyone can spare energy and time to worry about self-actualization (our highest need according to Maslow)?

Hopefully, asking the questions takes us a step closer to finding answers.

[Confidential Aside: "But it is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant."]