On Understanding Emotion in Others

A couple of weeks back, I spotted this article by David Brooks about understanding ones emotions and the way in which emotional literacy is at least as important as cognitive skills in determining ones success. It’s a case well made, and I recommend you read the article for it – his words are better than mine.

Near the end, though, he makes this observation, which has been sitting with me: “If you are going to hire, marry, befriend, manage or coach people, shouldn’t you know their core affect, the emotional base line they carry through life? Shouldn’t you know their emotional profile, the distinctive way they construct emotions in diverse circumstances? Shouldn’t you know how good they are at discerning, labeling and expressing their emotions?”

The answer to that rhetorical question is plainly yes, but the hard part is “How?”.

In the article, he talks about how rare it is for people to understand the physical signals that trigger different kinds of emotion in themselves and points at a method for how to do this (Mark Brackett’s book Permission to Feel). But how does one learn this about someone as an outsider?

You can’t just ask them, at least not directly, if they don’t know themselves. Observation is surely a factor – seeing how someone responds in various circumstances – but this isn’t that practical. I’m curious about what sorts of questions one might ask to learn this. Perhaps there are questions that help someone understand themselves, modeled on Brackett’s method, or maybe there are things that are easier for an outsider to see that can be probed. I’m not sure, but this is something I’d like to try to be better at.