Don't worry, nobody's gonna know ...

[ToughButterCup]

Yes, but I know.

 

The bodge, doesn't really matter what it is. The result of the bodge will be invisible. But I know its going to have to be a bodge. In this case it's a bodge caused by someone doing exactly what I told him not to.

 

And nobody will be able to tell its a bodge after I'm done. An extra half days work. 

There is no substitute for watching every tradesperson closely until  some  trust develops in the mix is there? 

 

I'm cross. Again. 

And if anyone says that  its OK, because nobody will know I'm going to ........

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

I'm cross. Again. 

And if anyone says that  its OK, because nobody will know I'm going to ........

That's okay, no one is going to know, because, like my sister, you are always cross about something.

[ToughButterCup]

Maybe forgetfulness is the way forward.

[ProDave]

go on, you can't keep us all guessing, you have to tell us exactly what instruction he misinterpreted, or we will have to start speculating?

[markc]

Is it a bodge or a difference of opinion on how to do something?

Is it a bodge or how they always do it? 
what defines a bodge?

 

[Ralph]

I can no longer be surprised at the half arsed approach to a lot of things in the building trade. One joiner told be the problem was that I'm on site seeing it progress rather than the finished house. 

"you don't want to see how the sausage is made" my response: "I would actually like to know it's a sausage and not a dog turd painted to look like a sausage" 

[SteamyTea]

Bodging 

 

BiL is one, though he trained in cabinetry.

 

 

 

 

[ToughButterCup]

It's soooooo simple and so stupid. 

The stairs handrail was put in - temporarily - using 5 by 100mm POSI screws sunk inside  a deep hole (30 mm) in the rail itself . I  told the guy helping me that because of my stupid hands, POSIs are a No - No anywhere on site. Torx heads were to be used everywhere and Spax ones at that.

 

I even gave him (to keep) his own case of Torx screws of the right size held in one of those plastic boxes - the boxes with a clear lid so you can see what the stock level is . 

 

You know what happens next. 

I needed to take the stair rail out this morning. It was fastened with six screws. To 'undo' the last screw (of six of the same type - fekkin' POSIs) , I've had to cut it: and to do that I could not avoid damaging the newel post.

 

I'll just have to hide the damage with a mixture of sanding and a fancy bit of quadrant.

 

In the scheme of things it's nowt. Lots of careful work had to be done to get to this stage. Needlessly worsened by mindlessness.  I'm a bit over-touchy about how much weaker my hands are now I've had the odd amputation or two (more on the way ?)

 

FFS Get a problem Ian ....  Or read your own signature line perhaps?

 

[SteamyTea]

Could you have not drilled them out?

[ToughButterCup]

18 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Could you have not drilled them out?

 

Yes. 

But time presses this morning. Like you say - 'm always cross about summat. Need a holiday. 

I'm more cross about having paid someone to do something - with a clear rationale for asking him to do it, and then find that he did the opposite.  I have to see him every morning that I take the grandbabies to skoool.

 

Moving swiftly on.......

[dpmiller]

why can't you use PZ screws Ian?

[SteamyTea]

8 minutes ago, dpmiller said:

why can't you use PZ screws Ian?

Because they sound silly with a German accent.

[ToughButterCup]

Vee Tschermans are not allowed to yoouze zees stooppid screwz. 

 

6 hours ago, dpmiller said:

why can't you use PZ screws Ian?

 

My hands have been weakened by 10+ operations on my hands, 8 fingers left of which 6 are in working order. I can't feel anything much in two of them.

 

Makes punching someone a breeze. Can't feel a thing.

 

Gaulhofer delivered our windows in wooden crates. I couldn't see any  heads of the screws they had used for packing: they were that deeply buried in the whitewood packaging . Once I had found the correct size of Torx head, I found that if just shoved the extended bit into the screw holes blind, the bit would engage with the Torx screw and out it would come. No caming out at all . Couldn't have done that with POSIs. Just not enough control over the grip needed to steady my hand.

 

Those Torx are the ones for me, I thought. Bought £500 worth of various sizes from Germany (when that was possible), and never gave the issue another thought.

50mm stainless screws for the cladding - about 30% of Screwfixes price. Couldn't believe the price difference. All the others noticeably cheaper even with the shipping.

 

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good innit?

Edited March 28, 2022 by ToughButterCup

[Jilly]

It's just SO annoying, isn't it?!

 

[ToughButterCup]

I'm very aware that being allowed to build is a privilege: as is a forum on which I can vent the most minor of irritations.

[joe90]

I take a different view, bodging is not doing the job properly first time, making good after someone else getting it wrong, although frustrating, is a necessary evil. I take my hat off to you doing all this work with less than efficient hands mate, get over it, no one died (yet). I am sure we all have had those problems somewhere during the build.

[TonyT]

I think it’s a general arrogance of trades that they know better.

 

Some always learn, go on courses and improve knowledge and skills.

Others use the same attitude and approach they learned as an apprentice ( assuming they did an apprenticeship of course) and come away with the infamous lines,, it’s always the way I do things, even though you issued a specification, drawing and they quoted on that, 9/10 the guy doin the work isn’t privy to that info and just does what he/she feels is correct…..

[ToughButterCup]

45 minutes ago, TonyT said:

I think it’s a general arrogance of trades that they know better.

...

 

Some do  know better and have good communication skills.  In this case, had the tradesman told me he was short of screws, I'd have given him more. 

 

Any job depends at some level on the ability to communicate, especially when things go wrong. And stuff goes wrong all the time. It's normal for stuff to go breasts high. 

 

The measure of a good trades person depends on technical skills as well as the emotional intelligence required to communicate effectively under pressure.

 

And which trades course teaches the latter skill? 

Correct.

It starts (if a little late by then) in the Reception class at school.

 

[SimonD]

14 hours ago, ToughButterCup said:

Those Torx are the ones for me,

 

Torx all the way for me. I hate PZ with a vengeance even with functioning hands. I've been using the Torx screws from Forgefast all the way through my build. Good price and work just as well as spax IMHO.

 

28 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

And which trades course teaches the latter skill? 

Correct.

It starts (if a little late by then) in the Reception class at school.

 

Honestly, I don't think the schools or the teachers are equiped in any way to teach emotional intelligence properly. They have neither the resources, time, nor the necessary training to do it. And that's not to criticise them, they've got enough crap on their plate and don't get sufficient reward or funding for what they do as it is. The construction industry has a culture problem in this regard too as it's 'too soft' which is shown by how high the figures are for those in the construction industry suffering mental health problems - unfortunately under the radar for the most part.

 

But as for the basics of communication and listening to the customer, there's just no excuse there!

Edited March 29, 2022 by SimonD

[ToughButterCup]

Emotional Intelligence is taught in an age-appropriate way @SimonD : it's a required part of the curriculum. It just doesn't go by the same name.  I used to train teaching students to plan , prepare and evaluate their own practice before qualification.

 

Infants sitting on the floor, listening, turn taking, working in a small group : year 6 children taking responsibility for one or two children in a lower year group. How to act as someone's buddy; how to mentor and the difference between mentoring and supporting colleagues - all (still) part of the primary curriculum.

 

The lone-tradesperson is a challenging role to take on. Because its so hard to get appropriate feedback: structured , accurate, informed , carefully delivered. And customers can and often behave completely unreasonably. But for some reason customers are always right. 

 

Thats nonsense.

 

Well qualified, competent tradespeople need appropriate support. In a one man business, working on your own for long periods (as was the case here) is not a good environment in which to work.  

Not to miss out on the  simple obvious answer in this case: he'd have been tired, piddled off and wanted to go home - found me as a customer a complete PITA, and thought:  sod it here's some screws, he won't notice until I'm well gone.  

 

Correct.

Repeat business - gone.

 

 

[SteamyTea]

There is a small building due in the town I work in.  Nice lads, both have Asperger's Syndrome.

They seem to survive as a company.

 

[SimonD]

7 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

Emotional Intelligence is taught in an age-appropriate way @SimonD : it's a required part of the curriculum. It just doesn't go by the same name.  I used to train teaching students to plan , prepare and evaluate their own practice before qualification.

 

Infants sitting on the floor, listening, turn taking, working in a small group : year 6 children taking responsibility for one or two children in a lower year group. How to act as someone's buddy; how to mentor and the difference between mentoring and supporting colleagues - all (still) part of the primary curriculum.

 

Kindness, yes, consideration, yes, and a number of other important social behaviours, yes (but with some caveats in what the children actually end up experiencing socially and culturally within the education system, which is in many ways at odds with this in terms of what actually gets valued and thus modelled). Emotional intelligence, however, it is not.

 

Please forgive my cynicism here. I work with people psychologically as my main profession. I first trained as a youth counsellor in the early 1990s and a lot of my work is related to mental health. I've spent a lot of time teaching and training clients in EI, especially in organisational contexts. I think there are serious questions as to whether the term EI has any real meaning or validity at all, other than being another means to derive better work productivity, and thus economic performace from individuals - which is really where EI as we know it today came from. It is more or less a tool for manipulating productivity rather than a tool for helping people to learn how to navigate a complex world and being able to effectively deal with the emotions associated with doing that - in this sense, children are not being taught EI.  The rise in young persons' mental health problems is an indicator that there is something wrong here and that what is being taught may not be of any practical use, rather like a number of things being taught within today's curriculum.

[SteamyTea]

5 minutes ago, SimonD said:

Please forgive my cynicism here

I am with you on this.

 

6 minutes ago, SimonD said:

I think there are serious questions as to whether the term EI has any real meaning or validity at all

It is like the term 'Thermal Mass'.  The words seem make sense, but as there are no actual units for 'thermal', it is a nonsense term.

 

I suspect that when the Intelligence Test started there was a lot of criticism about what it actually meant, and what it was actually assessing.  It is very hard to compare 'things' that are assessed on different criteria, and the poxy social sciences thrive on mixing unrelated units and using it to make a model that fits the data.

 

From 1996

Elusive EQ - Emotional intelligence could be one of the big ideas of the 1990s—if we can work out what it is, how to measure it and what to do with it

 

26 April 1996

IN the late 1980s, two American psychologists, Peter Salovey of Yale and John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire, were casting around for a pithy way to sum up human qualities such as empathy, self-awareness and emotional control. For a while, the phrase they hit on – “emotional intelligence” – languished in academic obscurity. Then Daniel Goleman, a writer with The New York Times, picked it up and nailed it to the mast of his best-seller Emotional Intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ.

Now the phrase is popping up everywhere. On the Oprah Winfrey show. In magazines that challenge you to “know your own emotional IQ”. On Internet sites which offer to test emotional intelligence or “EQ” with scenarios such as: “You’re on a plane that suddenly hits bad turbulence. Do you (a) continue to watch the movie (b) go on the alert for an emergency (c) do a little of a and b (d) not sure – never noticed?” Score 200 points and you’re an emotional “genius”, 25 and you’re a “Neanderthal” in need of psychotherapy. Emotional intelligence may have started out as an academic catch phrase, but it is fast becoming the psychological mantra of the mid-1990s.

And mostly for some very obvious reasons. Blaming today’s epidemics of violent crime, marital strife and teenage drug abuse on poor morals and a decline in national character sounds blimpish and defeatist. Blaming these ills on deficiencies in EQ, on the other hand, doesn’t sound so bad. After all, it might be possible to improve levels of emotional intelligence in the young to equip them for life’s trials. And there is much about emotional intelligence that sounds like plain common sense. Isn’t it obvious that the ability to, say, control rage or develop empathy is likely to make a better indicator of future success than the kind of abstract intelligence measured by IQ?

But even if it is, there are two big questions. Can emotional intelligence really be measured in a meaningful way? And if so, can young children found wanting in it be taught the necessary skills? Can EQ become a tool for fixing failing education systems?

 

Crusaders for emotional intelligence seem unreservedly optimistic. Not because they believe they have the tools today to reduce the concept of EQ to a numerical yardstick in the manner of IQ (Internet questionnaires are for fun, not science), but because of the remarkable predictive power they claim for something called the marshmallow test.

Back in the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Stanford University, gave marshmallows to groups of four-year-olds and then left the room, promising that any child who could postpone eating the marshmallow until he came back, some 15 to 20 minutes later, would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Years later, Mischel discovered that the kids who triumphed over their desire had grown into teenagers who were socially, emotionally and academically more competent than the four-year-olds who ate the marshmallow at once. Self-control in the face of a marshmallow at four was shown to be “twice as powerful a predictor of later academic prowess as IQ”, says Goleman in his book.

Goleman sees the ability to delay gratification as a master skill, a triumph of the reasoning brain over the impulsive one. But does it really provide a fundamental measure of emotional IQ? Unfortunately, the marshmallow test turns out to conceal some very complex mental behaviour.

 

Mischel went on to discover that the successful children were able to think of something else. Some would sing, tap their feet, tell themselves stories, imagine the marshmallow was a fluffy cloud – anything to avoid eating it. One held out by falling asleep.

So putting off rewards is not a single skill that educationalists can easily pinpoint and work on, but depends on complex cognitive abilities. Not only that, but what is true of the ability to delay gratification may be even more true of other, subtler components of emotional intelligence, such as self-awareness, impulse control, self-motivation and empathy. Can we measure these?

Some psychologists have serious doubts. “The idea that you can measure emotional intelligence like IQ is very misleading,” says Ross Buck, professor of communication sciences at the University of Connecticut. Emotional skills are slippery and relative in a way that IQ isn’t, he concludes. “Your communicative ability with someone you know is different from your communicative ability with a stranger, and each relationship will have its own characteristic emotional communication.”

Paul Harris, lecturer in experimental psychology at the University of Oxford and author of Children and Emotion, agrees. If you try to measure empathy, he says, your measurement will depend on who the child is being empathetic towards. In other words, every emotional response is embedded in its social context.

Behavioural research, aided by the advent of the video camera, shows how early in life this begins. Studies by Vasudevi Reddy, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, show how expressions of shyness in very young babies depend critically on social context. Young babies will sometimes turn their heads, avoid gaze or raise their arms to hide their faces – but precisely when and how often they do so depends on who they are with.

But even if we could measure such emotions in infants and the young, teaching their control to children, as Goleman suggests, would be no small task. Individual differences, coupled with the way emotions depend on social context, make it hard to imagine a training programme that could fit the needs of different children. “If someone has a tendency to be aggressive, you can train them to recognise and control their feelings,” says Buck. “But training an extrovert will be different from training an introvert. And it’s not the same as saying this person is or is not empathic.”

And there is another stumbling block for would-be teachers of empathy or self-awareness. Talk to your average five-year-old about empathy and you won’t get much response because expressing an emotion is not the same as understanding it. Harris, for example, concludes that four and five-year-olds have yet to discover that emotional lives are strongly influenced by a knowledge of other people’s feelings. At this age, he says, children believe that happiness and sadness depend simply on whether or not people get what they themselves want. Only later does their conscious emotional universe expand to include such notions as pride, guilt and shame.

Despite these complications, some psychologists and educators in the US are having a determined crack at improving “emotional literacy” with the aid of specially designed teaching programmes. At New Haven, for example, the Augusta Lewis Troup Middle School provides lessons in impulse control in which children are taught to think of traffic lights. About to hit out in anger? “See” the red light, stop, calm down. Amber light means think through the problem. Green light, a positive, nonaggressive solution.

Goleman’s book abounds with enthusiasm for such programmes. Yet their value to the majority of children remains unproven. According to Harris, the emotional analysis and training of children is certainly effective at the extremes of emotional illiteracy, for instance with children who’ve been severely maltreated or have specific needs. But Harris doubts such programmes could be extended effectively to the general population.

Even Goleman quotes the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle says: “Anyone can be angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.” The concept of emotional intelligence may have helped people realise that the emotional skills are important to intellectual achievement, but we may not be much nearer understanding how to measure or develop it than Aristotle was more than 2000 years ago.

 

And this from 2015

 

Self-mastery can be yours with three pillars of emotional wisdom

If you think you're an emotional dunce, don't despair. Anyone can improve their emotional life by honing three key skills

 

HUMANS 30 December 2015

By Linda Geddes

RILEY is moodily picking at her dinner. Noticing that something is amiss, her dad asks how school was. Inside Riley’s brain, a small green girl called Disgust flicks a switch, and Riley rolls her eyes: “School was great, all right?” she replies sarcastically. Sitting at the control panel in Dad’s mind, a skinny man called Fear reports the eye-roll to a character named Anger, who seems to be in charge. “Make a show of force,” he orders. “Riley, I do not like this new attitude,” Dad responds. The situation escalates until Riley screams: “Just shut up!” A big red button inside Dad’s head is pressed: “That’s it. Go to your room!”

This brain’s-eye view of emotions in Pixar’s recent movie, Inside Out, is entertaining, but it reinforces the questionable idea that our emotions control us – that they are powerful, primal forces we struggle to understand both in ourselves and in others. Popular though this picture may be, it is one that psychologists would like to dispel. Other animals may be slaves to emotion, but human emotional life is more complex and cerebral, they argue. What’s more, mastery of your emotions is important not just for psychological well-being, but also for success in many areas of life.

The concept of “emotional intelligence” surfaced two decades ago and was an instant hit. It tantalised us with the idea that we each have an EQ to our IQ, and promised to let us measure how emotionally clued-up individuals are. But it has its problems, not least in suggesting that people with a low EQ are forever saddled with it. EQ tests also often fail to do what they say on the tin: allow employers to find the most emotionally savvy candidate for the job. As a result, psychologists are falling out of love with emotional intelligence. Instead, they have identified three skills that can help us all become more emotionally adept, and reap the benefits.

 

“Emotions are like a language – one that all humans share”

Trace emotions back to their origins, and the notion that we are in thrall to them doesn’t seem so misplaced. Emotions evolved to help animals react quickly in life-or-death situations. The fight-or-flight response is a classic example. Before you are conscious of feeling fearful, your body and mind are already primed to act – your heart is racing, your vision focused, and you experience a hot rush of blood to the head and perhaps an urge to lash out. Emotions generate such physiological changes in all animals, but for us they are more than just subconscious calls to action. “Human emotions are enormously tilted towards social situations,” says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK. “We have jealousy, sympathy, a sense of injustice, and guilt. It’s these social emotions which really mark us out as a species.” They are also what make our emotional lives so complicated.

Some people are clearly better at coping with this complexity than others. This might help explain why the idea of emotional intelligence was so eagerly received in 1995, following the publication of psychologist Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. An international bestseller, it launched an industry peddling tests to select emotionally intelligent candidates for management positions and careers such as medicine. But for all the hype and the money spent, there has been a sense of disappointment – not just among employers. “People ask, ‘what the hell was it good for?'” says Klaus Scherer, director of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva.

 

“Mastering the language of emotions requires three key skills”

One problem with the tests is that they often ask participants to rate their own abilities – for example, to keep calm in difficult situations. Assuming respondents do not lie, they may still lack the self-awareness to give accurate answers. Another concern is that rather than measuring how well we use our emotions, the tests really measure personality and general intelligence. It has become clear that if you take these two factors into account, emotional intelligence scores say almost nothing about how competent someone is likely to be in the workplace.

Emotionally fluent

Scherer notes that the concept of emotional intelligence caught on before it had been properly researched. We now know far more about human emotions, in particular, that although some people are naturally more emotionally adept than others, all of us can learn to master our emotions more effectively. The notion of emotional intelligence is confused, in part because the very term EQ suggests an innate and unalterable measure – akin to IQ – even as its proponents promise that employees, students, indeed anyone, can learn to boost their score. Many psychologists now prefer the term “emotional competence”, because it signifies an ability that can be honed. Many also think of this ability as a sort of language – one that all humans share (see “One language, many dialects“). This, in turn, suggests how we can become more emotionally fluent. Just as learning a language entails recognising words, understanding how to use them, and controlling a conversation, so mastering the language of emotions requires three key skills – perception, understanding and regulation of emotions.

Perception is the bedrock on which the two other skills rest. Perceiving emotions is not as straightforward as it might sound. Traditional tests of emotional intelligence probe this skill using pictures of faces. “The tests are too easy,” says Katja Schlegel at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. For a start, expressions of emotion extend beyond the face to gestures and movements, plus tone of voice and other sounds. Aural and visual cues can interact; for example, one study found that the way people interpret laughter and crying sounds is altered by the facial expressions accompanying them. “The same laugh is perceived as sounding significantly happier when paired with a smiling face than when paired with a sad face,” says César Lima at University College London.

A static picture isn’t even a good representation of the way our faces express emotion. “The human face is equipped with a large number of independent muscles, each of which can be combined and activated at different levels of intensity over time,” says Rachael Jack at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her studies using computer-generated faces that randomly combine facial expressions, such as lip curls and raised eyebrows, suggest that each emotion has an associated sequence of facial movements, which she calls “action units”, unfolding a bit like the letters of a word. Action units strung together in specific patterns create “sentences” that communicate a more complex social message.

Schlegel is working with colleagues at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, to develop a better way of assessing how we judge emotional cues in everyday life. Named the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT), it involves a series of short videos of actors expressing an emotion by uttering meaningless syllables. People’s scores can range from 0 to 1, and preliminary research suggests that they are meaningful. When Schlegel invited pairs of strangers to negotiate a work contract, those with higher scores both negotiated more successfully and were perceived as being nicer and more cooperative than people with lower scores. “This is why I think emotion recognition is such an important skill,” she says. “It is difficult to convince a person of your ideas if you’re not paying attention to their needs and interests.”

So, how can you improve your emotion recognition skills? Schlegel teaches people to look for the appropriate cues in the face, voice and body, then gives them video clips to practise on, and get feedback. In one study she found that undergraduates trained in this way achieved an average GERT score of 0.75, compared with 0.6 for controls.

Lima’s group, meanwhile, has been looking at whether musical training can help. They found that adult musicians are better than non-musicians at judging the emotion in someone’s tone of voice. Brain imaging studies suggest that this reflects more than simply a general sensitivity to basic aspects of sound, says Lima. “Music training can modulate brain responses known to be more specifically associated with emotions and with our ability to interpret others’ minds.”

Recognising emotions is not enough, though. You also have to understand how they are used – and that’s the second skill. “Not everyone smiles when they’re happy, or scowls when they’re angry,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, also at Northeastern University. Indeed, she has found tremendous variability in brain activity, both between people and in the same individual, in response to different types of threat. This suggests that there is no “essence” of fear or anger. “Somebody who is highly emotionally competent has a very broad vocabulary of emotion concepts that are highly flexible,” she says. “They know how to impose meaning on smiles and scowls, frowns and vocal cues.” They can take emotional signals – both from the outside world or their own bodies – and make sense of them.

The ability to understand emotions in this way is not innate. “None of us are born knowing the difference between feeling overwhelmed and worried, elated and ecstatic. It’s a language that has to be taught,” says Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In an attempt to do that, a decade ago he helped create a programme called RULER, now used in some 10,000 US schools. It teaches children and young adults to interpret physiological changes in their bodies linked to emotions, label them, and learn strategies to regulate their emotions. “It’s remarkable work that has a tremendous impact on kids’ competence,” says Barrett. “When you can take a physical change in your body and understand it as an emotion, you learn to make meaning out of that change.” Evidence also suggests that it improves the relationship between teachers and students.

Other researchers are investigating whether having a broad and accurate vocabulary for your own emotions can make you more aware of other people’s emotions. “It’s still an open question,” says Agneta Fischer at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, who is leading one such study.

Once you can recognise and make sense of emotional signals, then you need the final skill – the ability to regulate your feelings. “Emotion regulation is important, both to ensure that you properly analyse and appraise a situation, and also that you conform to social standards and don’t allow yourself to show certain emotions at certain times,” says Scherer. Again, this isn’t something we are born with, and as we develop, some of us learn ineffective strategies for doing it, such as avoiding emotionally charged situations or trying to shut down our emotions completely. Research shows that people who address emotional situations directly rather than avoiding them have higher levels of well-being and are better able to cope with stress.

There are ways to improve your regulation skills. One approach psychologists favour is “reappraisal” – trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes so as to be more objective, and change your emotional response accordingly. When a team led by Ute Hülsheger at Maastricht University in the Netherlands taught this strategy to hairdressers, waiters and taxi drivers, they found that it resulted in more tips. “Reappraisal helps you to display authentic positive emotions, and that is rewarded by customers,” she says.

But rethinking your emotions from scratch requires a lot of effort. Another promising approach is mindfulness – observing the coming and going of your emotions without action or judgement. In a separate study, Hülsheger randomly picked members of a group of 64 employees to receive mindfulness training, and monitored them all over 10 days. Those who got the training reported more job satisfaction and less emotional exhaustion. “The idea is that when you just see emotions as they are, as thoughts and sensations, you gain a sense of perspective and the ‘hot’ aspect of the emotion dissolves,” she says.

Everyone knows that mastering a language takes time and practice. Some people are naturals. Others struggle to communicate effectively. But when it comes to the language of emotions, making the effort to improve is surely worth it, because the proponents of emotional intelligence were right about one thing – being emotionally fluent really does bring benefits.

(Images: Mohamad Itani/Millennium Images, UK, Rita Scaglia/Picturetank, Randi Sidman-Moore/Masterfile/Corbis)

One language, many dialects

Charles Darwin coined the term “the language of the emotions”. But do all people speak the same language? To get at an answer, David Matsumoto at San Francisco State University studied thousands of photos taken at the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic games in Athens, Greece, comparing the facial expressions of athletes who were born blind with those of their sighted counterparts. “You can rule out any possibility that they visually learned to put these expressions on their faces,” he says. “We found that there are seven categories of emotion that are universally produced on the face.” His list – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise – closely matches the universal emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman, who pioneered the field in the 1960s.

But although we all express pure and unfettered emotion in the same way, everyday variations arise, Matsumoto suspects, because we regulate our emotions to conform to cultural norms, with knock-on effects on the way we interpret emotion in others. One study, for example, found that American and European students frequently reported feeling pride, anger or irritation, whereas Japanese students more often experience feelings of closeness, shame, guilt or debt to another. Another study found that white Europeans could easily distinguish between facial expressions of surprise, fear, disgust and anger, whereas east Asians often confused disgust and anger, and fear and surprise. Eye-tracking revealed that the white Europeans looked at all areas of the face equally, while east Asians focused on the eyes.

What do such studies tell us? According to Batja Mesquita at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium, if you live in a culture where an emotion like anger is viewed as disturbing and selfish, you will not be rewarded for expressing it, and over time you may even cease to feel it as frequently or intensely. She has found that immigrants gradually adapt their emotions to the norms of their new home. It’s as if we all speak the same language but adopt the local dialect.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Control yourself”

[ToughButterCup]

35 minutes ago, SimonD said:

...Emotional intelligence, however, it is not. ...

 

Add the word -yet- and I agree with you

1 hour ago, SimonD said:

...

I've spent a lot of time teaching and training clients in EI, especially in organisational contexts. I think there are serious questions as to whether the term EI has any real meaning or validity at all, other than being another means to derive better work productivity, and thus economic performace from individuals - which is really where EI as we know it today came from. It is more or less a tool for manipulating productivity rather than a tool for helping people to learn how to navigate a complex world and being able to effectively deal with the emotions associated with doing that - in this sense, children are not being taught EI. 

...

 

What a really interesting response. Made me think.

I've only ever considered EI in the context of nurturing positive relationships between people especially when the contexts are or have become difficult.

 

Do you have any references for me to read about the relation between EI and economic performance please?

[SimonD]

3 hours ago, ToughButterCup said:

Add the word -yet- and I agree with you

lol 🙂

 

3 hours ago, ToughButterCup said:

Do you have any references for me to read about the relation between EI and economic performance please?

 

Goleman is a major proponent here. I've found a downloadable copy of the book The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace which is a bit of a follow on from his melding EI into a model for leadership during the 1990s. You can also find quite a bit on the Emotional Intelligence Consortium.

 

It's not that I'm against EI per se as a concept for being aware of and improving relationships, just more how it has been morphed into a tool applied for a defined gain, which changes the nature of it entirely. This is not unlike how Mindfulness has become a way in which organisations as well as societies at large can divert the responsibility away from themselves onto individuals rather than consider and change the organisational, or environmental context, that is causing the individual the problems in the first place. It's also about the imposition of a model of being onto general populations I question. I've worked in a number of engineering, technology, and accountancy firms, several of them world leaders in their field. In those organisations I've met a lot of specialists that don't posess great interpersonal skills to say the least, they're techies and specialists and that part of their nature is actually part of what makes them special. EI training here doesn't land very well...nor does it necessarily provide the intended gains, but can have the opposite effect on those individuals.