Brain Facts:
Social Intelligence

Attunement

Attunement is attention that goes beyond momentary empathy to a full, sustained presence that facilitates rapport. We offer a person our total attention and listen fully. We seek to understand the other person rather than just making our own point.

Such deep listening seems to be a natural aptitude. Still, as with all Social Intelligence dimensions, people can improve their attunement skills. And we all can facilitate attunement simply by intentional paying more attention.

Concern

Concern reflects a person’s capacity for compassion. Manipulative people can be skilled in other abilities of Social Intelligence, but they fail here. Deficiencies in this aspect of social facility should most strongly identify antisocial types, who do not care about others’ needs of suffering, let alone seek to help them.

Connected
—Brain Chemicals

Panksepp theorizes that the gratification that addicts get from their drugs biologically mimics the natural pleasure we get from feeling connected to those we love; the neural circuitry for both are largely shared. Even animals, he finds, prefer to spend time with those in whose presence they have secreted oxytocin and natural opioids, which induce a relaxed serenity—suggesting that these brain chemicals cement our family ties and friendships as well as our love relationships.

Connected
—Socially

Staying connected reduces anxiety and lowers the amount of stress hormones released into the body. This is important because stress hormones are known to contribute to heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and many other age-related diseases. The MacArthur Study of Successful Aging found that long-standing emotional support was associated with significantly lower blood levels of cortisol and other stress hormones. Socially connected volunteers in that study also required less pain medication following surgery, recovered more quickly, and followed their doctor’s post-op advice more closely.

Connected
—Socially

MacArthur Study of Successful Aging found that people who are socially connected may survive up to 20 percent longer than those who live more isolated lives.

Contagion

When two people interact face to face, contagion spreads via multiple neural circuits operating in parallel within each person’s brain. These systems for emotional contagion traffic in the entire range of feeling, from sadness and anxiety to joy.

Emotional Contagion, High Road

The “high road”, runs through neural systems that work more methodically and step by step, with deliberate effort. We are aware of the high road, and it gives us at least some control over our inner life, which the low road denies us.

To over simplify, the low road uses neural circuitry that runs through the amygdala and similar automatic nodes, while the high road sends input to the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive center, which contains our capacity for intentionality.

Emotional Contagion, Low Road

Emotional contagion exemplifies what can be called the brain’s “low road” at work. The low road is circuitry that operates beneath our awareness, automatically and effortlessly, with immense speed.

Empathy

Empathy -sensing another’s emotions -seems to be as physiological as it is mental, built on sharing the inner state of the other person. This biological dance occurs when anyone empathizes with someone else—the empathizer subtly shares the physiological state of the person with whom she attunes.

Empathy

In today’s psychology, the word “empathy” is used in three distinct senses: knowing another person’s feeling; feeling what the person feels; and responding compassionately to another distress. These three varieties of empathy seem to describe a 1-2-3 sequence: I notice you, I feel with you, and so I act to help you.

Empathy
—Women

Women tend to do a bit better on this dimension of empathy (interpersonally sensitive) than men, scoring about three percent higher on average. No matter what our ability may be now, empathy seems to improve with time, honed by the circumstances of life.

Forthrightness

Forthrightness is the brain’s default response: our neural wiring transmits our every minor mood onto the muscles of our face, making our feeling instantly visible. The display of emotions is automatic and unconscious, and so it suppression demands conscious effort. Being devious about what we feel -trying to hid our fear or anger - demands active effort and rarely succeeds perfectly.

Harvard University Socializing

Dr. Thomas Glass and his associates at Harvard University showed that spending enjoyable time with others actually extends life expectancy. They looked at approximately three thousand older Americans to see how much time they spend in a variety of social activities, such as play games, attending sports events, and going out to restaurants. Their decade of research showed that the chance of longer survival was 20 percent greater for people who spent more time socializing than for those who socialized very little or not at all.

Mindsight

Mindsight amounts to peering into the mind of a person to sense their feeling and deduce their thoughts—the fundamental ability of empathic accuracy. While we can’t actually read another person’s mind, we do pick up enough clues from their face, voice, and eyes—reading between the lines of what they say and do—to make remarkably accurate inferences.

Mirror Neurons

A different variety of brain cells, mirror neurons, sense both the move another person is about to make and their feelings, and instantaneously prepare us to imitate that movement and feel with them.

Mirror Neurons

“Mirror” neurons reflect back an action we observe in someone else, making us mimic that action or have the impulse to do so. These do-as-she-does neurons offer a brain mechanism that explains the old lyric, “When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.”

Mirror Neurons
—Learning

Mirror neurons appear to be essential to the way children learn. Imitative learning has long been recognized as a major avenue of childhood development. But finding about mirror neurons explains how children can gain mastery simply from watching. As they watch, they are etching in their own brains a repertoire for emotion, for behavior, and for how the world works.

Oscillators

Whenever we find ourselves in harmony with someone else, we can thank what neuroscientist call “oscillators,” neural systems that act like clocks, resetting over and over their rate of firing to coordinate with the periodicity of an incoming signal.

Projection

Projection ignores the other person’s inner reality; when we are projecting, we assume the other feels and thinks as we do. In full-fledged projection we simply map our world onto someone else’s, with no fit or attunement whatsoever. People who are self-absorbed, lost in their own inner world, have little choice but to project that sensibility onto whomever they perceive.

Rapport

Rapport feels good, generating the harmonious glow of being simpatico, a sense of friendliness where each person feels the other’s warmth, understanding, and genuineness. These mutual feels of liking strengthen the bonds between them, no matter how temporary.
That special connect, Rosenthal has found, always entails three elements:  mutual attention, shared positive feeling, and a well-coordinated nonverbal duet. As these three arise in tandem, we catalyze rapport.

Rapport

Contrary to the advice of popular books on the matter, intentionally matching someone—imitating the position of their arms, say, or taking on their posture—does not in itself heighten rapport. Such mechanical synchrony feels off.

Social psychologist have found again and again that the more two people naturally make coupled moves—simultaneous, at a similar tempo, or otherwise coordinated—the greater their positive feelings.

Rejection

The feeling of hurt has a neural basis. Our brain registers social rejections in the very area that activates when we are hurt physically: the anterior cingulated cortex (or ACC), which is known to generate amount other things, the distressing sensations of bodily pain.

Relationships

Nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.

Sociable Brain

We are wired to connect.

Social Brain

The social brain is the sum of the neural mechanisms that orchestrate our interactions as well as our thoughts and feelings about people and our relationships. The most telling news here may be that the social brain represents the only biological system in our bodies that continually attunes us to, and in turn becomes influenced by, the internal state of people we’re with.

Social Cognition

Social cognition, the fourth aspect of interpersonal awareness is knowledge about how the social world actually works. We mobilize social cognition to navigate the interpersonal world’s subtle and shifting current and to make sense of social events. It can make the difference in understanding why a remark that one person sees as witty banter may seem insulting sarcasm to another.

Social Depression

When our need for closeness goes unmet, emotional disorders can result. Psychologists have coined the term “social depression” for the particular unhappiness caused by troubled, threatened relationships. Social rejection—or fearing it—is one of the most common causes of anxiety. Feeling of inclusion depends not so much on having frequent social contacts or numerous relationships as on how accepted we feel, even in just a few key relationships.

Social Interactions

Social interactions play a role in shaping our brain, through “neuroplasticity,” which means that repeated experiences sculpt the shape, size and number of neurons and their synaptic connections.

Socializing

Dr. Thomas Glass and his associates at Harvard University showed that spending enjoyable time with others actually extends life expectancy. They looked at approximately three thousand older Americans to see how much time they spend in a variety of social activities, such as play games, attending sports events, and going out to restaurants. Their decade of research showed that the change of longer survival was 20 percent greater for people who spent more time socializing than for those who socialized very little or not at all.

Spindle Cells' Chemicals

The particular brain chemical those axons transmit suggests their central role in social connection. Spindle cells are rich in receptors for serotonin, dopamine, and vasopressin. These brain chemicals play key roles in bonding with others, in love, in our moods good and bad, and in pleasure.

Two-Person Matrix

At an unconscious level, we are in constant dialogue with anyone we interact with, our every feeling and very way of moving attuned to theirs. At least for the moment our mental life is co-created, in an interconnected two-person matrix.