CONTROLLING EMOTION, CONTROLLING THOUGHT

One morning recently, I listened to a humorous report on NPR’s Morning Edition that asked, “Does Getting Angry Make You Angrier?”

Two things struck me immediately. The first was that, as funny as it was to hear about “Sarah’s Smash Shack,” a business that gives people an opportunity to work out their frustrations by breaking plates, this is behavior that we routinely discourage in children.

With good reason, we tell kids that acting on their emotions in a destructive manner is “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” The process of controlling your reactions and feelings when events are disappointing or frustrating is unformed in babies, and society inculcates self-regulation as they grow.

While there is undoubtedly value in recognizing the source of anger, if we don’t rein that anger in we are not setting the best example for young people, something I will try to remember the next time I’m driving and someone abruptly cuts in front of me.

In addition, we are not helping ourselves by indulging in anger. Indeed, the NPR report noted that “decades of research on cathartic anger—the theory that actively expressing your anger can reduce or relieve the feeling…very clearly shows the opposite is true.”

The second thing that struck me about this report was a connection I made to brain research done by such pioneers as Antonio Damasio. These studies are showing that what we think of as “reason” is, like all our thinking, based in the limbic system of our brains. Emotional thought is the driver of all thought.

Surely learning to regulate emotion is the key to what we need to be learners—the ability to focus and thus engage in deeper and more reflective thinking.

Something Sylvia Bunge, a psychology professor at Cal Berkeley, talked about during a lecture titled “How We Control Our Thoughts & Actions: Implications for the Classroom” at a Learning and the Brain Conference still sticks with me over a year later. When presented with questions where they had to pick one of two responses, the children who did better in her study were those who slowed down and took a moment to reflect before choosing.

This counterintuitive principle—for most of us doing better is doing it faster—is often difficult for children to understand. And it is rooted in controlling impulsive action prompted by emotion.
Getting kids to think about this and ways they can take charge of their feelings is one way to help them go further and regulate their thought processes. Controlling our own emotions and talking about how we are doing that is another way. As the NPR report put it, “The key is to speak out your anger without getting emotional about it.”

Read more about emotional intelligence in a recent Boston Globe article, "The other kind of smart." There's also a fantastic article in a recent New Yorker about self-control.