emotional intelligence

Emotional Intelligence Must Guide Artificial Intelligence

Posted by

0


A photo of a robot hand holding a stethoscope

Lazarus is an adjunct professor of psychiatry and a regular commentator on the practice of medicine.

I don’t understand the brouhaha about artificial intelligence (AI). It’s artificial — or augmented — but in either case, it’s not real. AI cannot replace clinicians. AI cannot practice clinical medicine or serve as a substitute for clinical decision-making, even if AI can outperformopens in a new tab or window humans on certain exams. When put to the real test — for example, making utilization review decisions — the error rate can be as high as 90%opens in a new tab or window.

Findings presented at the 2023 meeting of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists showed that the AI chatbot ChatGPT provided incorrect or incompleteopens in a new tab or window information when asked about drugs, and in some cases invented references to support its answers. Researchers said the AI tool is not yet accurate enough to answer consumer or pharmacist questions. Of course it’s not. AI is only as smart as the people who build it.

What do you expect from a decision tree programmed by an MBA and not an actual doctor? Or a large language model that is prone to fabricate or “hallucinateopens in a new tab or window” — that is, confidently generate responses without backing data? If you try to find ChatGPT’s sources through PubMed or a Google search you often strike out.

The fact is the U.S. healthcare industry has a long record of problematic AI use, including establishing algorithmic racial biasopens in a new tab or window in patient care. In a recent studyopens in a new tab or window that sought to assess ChatGPT’s accuracy in providing educational information on epilepsy, ChatGPT provided correct but insufficient responses to 16 of 57 questions, and one response contained a mix of correct and incorrect information. Research involving medical questions in a wide range of specialties has suggested that, despite improvements, AI should not be relied on as a sole source of medical knowledge because it lacks reliability and can be “spectacularly and surprisingly wrong.opens in a new tab or window“

It seems axiomatic that the development and deployment of any AI system would require expert human oversight to minimize patient risks and ensure that clinical discretion is part of the operating system. AI systems must be developed to manage biases effectively, ensuring that they are non-discriminatory, transparent, and respect patients’ rights. Healthcare companies relying on AI technology need to input the highest-quality data and monitor the outcomes of answers to queries.

What we need is more emotional intelligence (EI) to guide artificial intelligence.

EI is fundamental in human-centered care, where empathy, compassion, and effective communication are key. Emotional intelligence fosters empathetic patient-doctor relationships, which are fundamental to patient satisfaction and treatment adherence. Doctors with high EI can understand and manage their own emotions and those of their patients, facilitating effective communication and mutual understanding. EI is essential for managing stressful situations, making difficult decisions, and working collaboratively within healthcare teams.

Furthermore, EI plays a significant role in ethical decision-making, as it enables physicians to consider patients’ emotions and perspectives when making treatment decisions. Because EI enhances the ability to identify, understand, and manage emotions in oneself and others, it is a crucial skill set that can significantly influence the quality of patient care, physician-patient relationships, and the overall healthcare experience.

AI lacks the ability to understand and respond to human emotions, a gap filled by EI. Despite the advanced capabilities of AI, it cannot replace the human touch in medicine. From the doctors’ perspective, many still believe that touch makes important connectionsopens in a new tab or window with patients.

Simon Spivack, MD, MPH, a pulmonologist affiliated with Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System in New York, remarkedopens in a new tab or window, “touch traverses the boundary between healer and patient. It tells patients that they are worthy of human contact … While the process takes extra time, and we have precious little of it, I firmly believe it’s the least we can do as healers — and as fellow human beings.”

Spivack further observed: “[I]n our increasingly technology-driven future, I am quite comfortable predicting that nothing — not bureaucratic exigencies, nor virtual medical visits, nor robots controlled by artificial intelligence — will substitute for this essential human-to-human connection.”

Patients often need reassurance, empathy, and emotional support, especially when dealing with severe or chronic illnesses. These are aspects that AI, with its current capabilities, cannot offer. I’m reminded of Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Data is an artificially intelligent android who is capable of touch but lacks emotions. Nothing in Data’s life is more important than his quest to become more human. However, when Data acquires the “emotion chip,” it overloads his positronicopens in a new tab or window relays and eventually the chip has to be removed. Once artificial, always artificial.

Harvard medical educator Bernard Chang, MD, MMSc, remarkedopens in a new tab or window: “[I]f the value that physicians of the future will bring to their AI-assisted in-person patient appointments is considered, it becomes clear that a thorough grounding in sensitive but effective history-taking, personally respectful and culturally humble education and counseling, and compassionate bedside manner will be more important than ever. Artificial intelligence may be able to engineer generically empathic prose, but the much more complex verbal and nonverbal patient-physician communication that characterizes the best clinical visits will likely elude it for some time.”

In essence, AI and EI are not competing elements but complementary aspects in modern medical practice. While AI brings about efficiency, precision, and technological advancements, EI ensures empathetic patient interactions and effective communication. The ideal medical practice would leverage AI for tasks involving data analysis and prediction, while relying on EI for patient treatment and clinical decision-making, thereby ensuring quality and holistic patient care.

There was a reason Jean-Luc Picard was Captain of the USS Enterprise and Data was not.

Data had all the artificial intelligence he ever needed in his computer-like brain and the Enterprise’s massive data banks, but ultimately it was Picard’s intuitive and incisive decision-making that enabled the Enterprise crew to go where no one had gone before.

What to teach your kids if you want them to be emotionally intelligent.

Posted by

0


We all want our kids to be happy and successful, so it makes sense to work backward and figure out how to make that happen.

children kids

Step 1: To be happy and successful, they need to develop great relationships.

Step 2: To develop those relationships, they need adequate emotional intelligence.

Step 3: To develop emotional intelligence, it helps if their mentors (especially their parents) model good behavior in love and partnerships.

At Scary Mommy, my former colleague Leigh Anderson put together one of the best prescriptions I’ve seen on how to teach your kids to do this, and why.

She spoke with Carrie Cole, a Gottman Institute trained therapist, about “how to have a good relationship with your partner and how to model one for your kids.”

Shutterstock
1. Teach them to ‘turn toward’
Relationships are dynamic. They’re made up of an uncountable number of small interactions. Julie and John Gottman, a husband and wife team of psychologists who are experts in this area, describe these interactions as “micro-behaviors” and “bids for attention.”

We “bid for attention” with the people we care about by doing things — starting conversations, for example — in the hope they’ll demonstrate interest and warmth. Catching those bids, and showing you value the relationship, requires active listening and empathy.

For example, you might tell your spouse, or another person you care about, “I learned something really cool today.” You hope that he or she will “turn toward” you by replying with something like, “Oh? Tell me about it,” as opposed to shutting you down: “Can’t you see I’m busy?!!!”

So, model this behavior in your relationships, and teach your kids to “turn toward” when the people they care about bid for their attention.

2. Teach them to politely turn down bids for attention
Of course, if we had to “turn toward” every time someone we cared about bid for our attention, we’d never get anything done. Perhaps even a majority of the time, you have to find a way to refrain from “turning toward,” in a way that shows you still value your relationship.

My wife is a master at this — of necessity — otherwise she could spend her entire life listening to me dissect political races, place the names of character actors in movies, and tell her arguably funny stories about things that happened in college.

It’s really a matter of demonstrating interest in what the people you care about have to say, while making clear the practical limits on your time and attention. In her essay, Leigh offers a simple example — turning down her child’s bid for attention simply by saying, “I can’t listen to your story right now, but I can after lunch.”

So when you can’t spend the time you might like responding to a bid for attention, at least turn it down politely — never dismissively.

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
3. Teach them to ‘be overwhelmed without freaking out’
Negative situations are often made worse by allowing your negative emotions to metastasize. So, the goal is to maintain control of your emotions even when you’re not in control of the situation.

In the military, we call this “maintaining your bearing.” However, it’s especially important when stressful situations involve the health or feelings of the people you care about most.

As Leigh wrote: “Learning to be under stress without taking it out on your nearest and dearest is a valuable relationship skill.”

I find it helps to think of a quote from author H.G. Wells, and remember that “the crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”

4. Teach them to ‘make repairs’
One of the most important things I’ve learned from the many articles I’ve read (and written) about developing good life habits is this: It’s okay that you’ll fall short.

You will, I will, your kids will. Everybody makes mistakes — and everybody sometimes hurts the people they love. The key thing you want to model for your kids, however, is how to react when you’ve screwed up.

As Leigh wrote of her conversation with Carrie: “The secret… is in the ‘repair’ — apologizing when you’re irritable or dismissive of someone’s overture. Apologizing or otherwise making amends goes a long way toward telling the other person that you do care about his needs.”

Rick Scuteri/AP
5. Teach them to appreciate others out loud
We talk a lot about learning to be thankful, but I think this is an important difference — learning to say out loud that you’re grateful, and to specific people (namely, the ones you care most about).

I’m horrible at compliments, although I’m learning. That’s important as a father, because I want to model appreciating others in a vocal way.

Once again, Leigh put it well: “In small moments, catch someone doing something well or right. It’s helpful for kids to hear their parents saying that. You’re saying, ‘We have a culture of appreciation in our home. This is what we do. We let one another know what we appreciate about one another.'”

6. Teach them that contempt is verboten
The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s apathy. Contempt is its near cousin. It rears its ugly head in relationships, to the point that the Gottmans think of it as the early warning sign for a marital relationship that is likely to fail.

We all get angry at the people we care about. Sometimes they do things that we don’t know how to put up with. However, the important thing is to show kids that it never overwhelms the underlying love.

As Leigh quoted Carrie in her article: “Emotional abuse is contempt… If a child grows up in a home like that — [for example], if the father puts down the mother, the boys will think this is acceptable behavior. And girls think this is acceptable to be treated like this. If you can’t turn around the contempt, the relationship is in serious trouble.”
7. Teach them not to tell mean jokes
Oh, they can — and should — tell jokes. However, mean jokes are often simply thinly veiled vessels for contempt — and we’ve already seen that contempt is the sign of a dead relationship.

Leigh describes a husband and wife in one of Carrie’s counseling sessions, where the wife began a sentence by saying, “I was thinking… ” and the husband interrupted with a laugh: “Oh honey, don’t think!”

Even if she smiled or chuckled, you can imagine how hurtful her husband’s joke was — and how it hurt their relationship — all because of his lack of emotional intelligence.

Leigh wrote about two other lessons as well — teaching kids to have relationships across generations, and working with you to establish their values and culture at home. However, I think these seven are the most apt.

What do you think? What other lessons are important to teach kids in order for them to develop emotional intelligence and healthy relationships? Let us know in the comments below, and check out the free e-book: “How to Raise Successful Kids: Advice From a Stanford Dean, a Navy SEAL, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Dad (Among Others).”

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Posted by

0


Marc Brackett, PhD, studies the ways emotions affect our relationships, mental health, decision-making, and academic and workplace performance. As director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Brackett and his team are helping schools across the country teach students the principles of emotional intelligence. Their research shows that learning to harness emotions can help both children and adults thrive at school, home, and in everyday life.

sign

WebMD: What is emotional intelligence?

Brackett: Emotional intelligence is the way we reason with our emotions and about our emotions. We see it as a set of skills, which we define with the term RULER:

  • Recognizing emotions
  • Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions
  • Labeling emotions
  • Expressing emotions the right way
  • Regulating emotions appropriately

Marc Brackett, Ph.D.

Marc Brackett, Ph.D.

WebMD: Why is emotional intelligence important?

Brackett: Emotions matter for a variety of reasons. The first is for attention and learning. Our ability to manage distractions while we work on a project or take a test helps us focus and perform at our best. Emotions also affect our decision-making and judgment. For example, in one study we showed that teachers’ feelings influenced how they evaluated their students. The third is relationship quality. How we feel and how we display our feelings influences the way people respond to us. Emotions are like signals that tell people to approach or avoid us. The fourth is mental and physical health. If we don’t have strategies, for example, to manage our sadness or hopelessness, it can eventually lead to depression. Likewise, feelings of nervousness can eventually lead to anxiety if they’re not managed effectively. And finally, emotions help improve our everyday effectiveness at school or work. Life is filled with disappointments, frustrations, and negative feedback, and unless we have the strategies to manage those difficult experiences, often we give up or we don’t succeed.

WebMD: What misperceptions do people have about emotional intelligence?

Brackett: Some people take the view that emotional intelligence is a soft skill that isn’t important or measurable. We take the stance that emotional intelligence is a hard set of skills that do matter. We’ve done studies where we’ve measured people’s emotional intelligence–both children and adults–and we’ve found that people with more developed emotional intelligence tend to be healthier and happier, have better relationships, and have less burnout in their jobs. They also tend to be rated as more effective leaders. Pretty much all around, we find that these skills make a difference.

WebMD: Is emotional intelligence something you’re born with, or can you be taught it?

Brackett: Some of it is inborn, but much of it is learned. For example, you’re not born with language for emotion. You have to be taught words to understand who you are. The same goes for regulating emotion. You’re not born with effective strategies to manage emotion. If you’re raised by parents who yell, scream, hit, and ignore, that’s what you’re going to learn. If you’re raised in a family that asks you how you’re feeling, checks into the reasons for those feelings, and teaches you strategies to manage your feelings, you’re going to learn emotional intelligence.

WebMD: What are schools doing to address kids’ emotional intelligence?

Brackett: We have an approach to social and emotional learning that we call RULER, which is an acronym for the five skills of emotional intelligence. The first tool we teach is called the emotional intelligence charter. The Charter allows students to share how they want to feel in the classroom. That helps to make the classroom a place where students can feel safe talking about their feelings. The second tool is called the Mood Meter. There are four quadrants, each of which represents a different family of feelings. Yellow is happy and excited. Red is anxious and angry. Blue is down and disappointed. Green is calm and content. Students learn how to plot their emotional states using the Mood Meter, which helps them build emotional self-awareness. The third tool is called the Meta-Moment. It helps students handle strong emotions so they can manage difficult situations and triggers. And the fourth tool is called the Blueprint, which helps students become better at resolving conflict and seeing disagreements from other people’s perspectives. Adults use these same tools to model the skills of emotional intelligence.

WebMD: How do these tools help students learn more effectively?

Brackett: Our research finds that embedding these tools into a school shifts many things. Classrooms become places where there’s more warmth, more connectivity between teachers and students, and more student engagement. We also see shifts in students’ emotional states. When they develop emotional intelligence skills they become less anxious, they have less emotional distress, and they have stronger academic gains.

WebMD: Some educators say teaching emotional intelligence is a fad and its importance is overrated. What do you think?

Brackett: Our emotions are in our brains just like our thoughts are, and they’re working together at every moment of every day from the moment we’re born until the moment we die. Until we acknowledge that emotions matter and that they influence all aspects of our functioning, from our decisions to our relationships to our health, our society is not going to thrive. Educators who don’t take emotional intelligence seriously are, in many ways, doing a disservice to our nation’s youth because the research is so clear that children who have these skills do better. And the research is clear that schools that adopt these practices have better outcomes.

WebMD: How does addressing emotional intelligence equip teens for later life?

Brackett: You need emotional intelligence skills to be able to handle transitions effectively. Otherwise, when you get angry and frustrated you will likely allow emotions to take over. Emotional intelligence also is important for the college transition. Your peer group in college has more influence than your parents, and you’re going to be in situations where you’ll have to make pretty tough decisions. Unless you have well-developed emotional intelligence skills, chances are you’ll make less effective decisions. We’ve shown in our research that college students who have less developed emotional intelligence are more likely to drink, do drugs, and engage in at-risk behaviors. We see emotional intelligence as a buffer for students against these negative outcomes. Then when you get a job you might have a really difficult boss, or a colleague who’s lazy, or a client who doesn’t have good skills. And again, you’ll need emotional intelligence. We argue that you need these skills from womb to tomb.

Emotional Intelligence is Great, Until it’s Misused .

Posted by

0


Emotional intelligence, i.e. the balancing of raw intelligence with emotional awareness, is a double-edged sword: it helps us empathize with others and avoid common misunderstandings that result in hurt feelings, but in the wrong hands, it can become a tool of manipulation.

Popularized by psychologist Daniel Goldberg in his 1995 book “Emotional Intelligence”, the idea took popular psychology by storm. The concept of a non-quantifiable, emotionally intuitive intelligence retooled our vision of what it meant to be smart, helping to explain why some extremely bright people just can’t get along.

Emotional intelligence also signaled that people who understood uniquely human desires, such as the need to feel respected, listened to, and understood, could benefit organizations by harnessing social capital. But just as human resource departments cultivated emotional intelligence, narcissistic and Machiavellian coworkers did the same.

Treacherous employee backstabbing a colleague

A brief overview of recent studies at The Atlantic cites evidence that developing emotional intelligence can result in more narcissistic behavior, and if one has the proclivity toward deceit, having emotional intelligence can make such subterfuge more insidious still:

“A 2010 journal article [published in Research in Organizational Behavior] reviewed ‘self-serving’ uses of EI in office settings, such as ‘focusing on strategically important targets’ (subordinates, rivals, supervisors) and working to ‘distort, block or amplify rumors, gossip, and other types of emotion-laden information’.”

What’s perhaps worst of all is that individuals with strategically deceitful attitudes may be blissfully unaware of their own behavior. Neuroscientist James Fallon is famously one of those people. Blind to his own manipulative tendencies his whole life, it was only in his sixties that he realized he habitually badgered and manipulated people without concern for his own actions. His Big Think interview is a fascinating look at what it’s like to discover one’s darker side and come out the other end.

 

Domestic Violence Hurts Kids’ Ability To Read Emotions And Regulate Their Own

Posted by

0


Kids who witness their parents fighting have trouble recognizing other people’s emotions and regulating their own, finds a newstudy from New York University on the collateral damage of domestic violence.

The study also suggests household chaos and chronic poverty take a similar toll on young minds. Not only are the financial and health-related concerns an issue for children, but their emotional intelligence and psychological well-being is at stake. Instability at home translates into poor performance, academically and socially, in school. Helping to reduce kids’ suffering could go a long way toward fixing other ailments that may be branching off.

fighting

“This study shines a bright light on the importance of supporting parents as they navigate the ups and downs of partnership or marriage,” said C. Cybele Raver, professor of applied psychology at NYU, in a statement.

When parents encounter financial hardship and personal turmoil, that’s when anger management strategies are needed the most, Raver added, because the net effect is a budding generation taking its cues from them. In their study, the team looked at several forms of adversity, tracking behavior outcomes among 1,025 children from the time they were 2 months old until they were just under 5.

They made house visits, issued parent questionnaires, administered tasks to both parents and children, and measured the level of household chaos — defined as the number of times families moved, changes in caregiver, noise levels, and the number people compared to the number of rooms. At 4 years and 10 months, they evaluated kids’ abilities to spot specific emotions.

Verbal and physical aggression were two of the greatest predictors of emotional recognition skills. Interestingly, while physical aggression predicted poorer skills, verbal aggression actually predicted kids would have better abilities at recognizing particular emotions — perhaps because the emotions found in a person’s words are more easily deduced than the emotion behind a slap or punch.

As expected, both forms of aggression predicted kids’ poorer ability to regulate their own emotions. When sad, they were less able to develop coping strategies on their own. The same played out when they were fearful and withdrawn. The researchers found this finding of particular concern because it could lay a dangerous foundation for depression and anxiety later in life.

Among the other influencers in the study, kids were most likely to suffer emotional deficits when they spent a greater number of years in poverty and when their homes were disorganized. According to Raver, the findings put the onus on parents in poverty, or approaching poverty. Too often, she said, they “need help regulating their own feelings of anger, frustration, and worry when balancing the demands of work, family, and romantic partnership, especially when money is tight.”

Prior research has found these cycles of poverty not only to be near-impossible to break, but actually affect the future generation’s DNA. In April, researchersdiscovered kids in poverty had older genes than kids of wealthier families. Coupled with the latest findings, the body of research paints poverty as far more than a socioeconomic bracket. It’s an entirely different world, filled with unique challenges and an overwhelming number of risks.

“Arguing and fighting is psychologically stressful for the adults caught in conflict,” Raver said. “This study demonstrates the costs of that conflict for children in the household as well.”

Source: Raver C, Blair C, Garrett-Peters P, et al. Poverty, household chaos, and interparental aggression predict children’s ability to recognize and modulate negative emotions. Development and Psychopathology. 2014.

Caffeine: The Silent Killer of Success

Posted by

0


This week’s tip for improving your performance is the most simple and straightforward method I’ve provided thus far. For many people, this tip has the potential to have a bigger impact than any other single action. The catch? You have to cut down on caffeine, and as any caffeine drinker can attest, this is easier said than done.

For those who aren’t aware, the ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and we’ve found that 90% of top performers are high in emotional intelligence. These individuals are skilled at managing their emotions (even in times of high stress) in order to remain calm and in control.

The Good: Isn’t Really Good

Most people start drinking caffeine because it makes them feel more alert and improves their mood. Many studies suggest that caffeine actually improves cognitive task performance (memory, attention span, etc.) in the short-term. Unfortunately, these studies fail to consider the participants’ caffeine habits. New research from Johns Hopkins Medical School shows that performance increases due to caffeine intake are the result of caffeine drinkers experiencing a short-term reversal of caffeine withdrawal. By controlling for caffeine use in study participants, John Hopkins researchers found that caffeine-related performance improvement is nonexistent without caffeine withdrawal. In essence, coming off caffeine reduces your cognitive performance and has a negative impact on your mood. The only way to get back to normal is to drink caffeine, and when you do drink it, you feel like it’s taking you to new heights. In reality, the caffeine is just taking your performance back to normal for a short period.

The Bad: Adrenaline

Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight or flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state, your emotions overrun your behavior.

Irritability and anxiety are the most commonly seen emotional effects of caffeine, but caffeine enables all of your emotions to take charge.

The negative effects of a caffeine-generated adrenaline surge are not just behavioral. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that large doses of caffeine raise blood pressure, stimulate the heart, and produce rapid shallow breathing, which readers of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 know deprives the brain of the oxygen needed to keep your thinking calm and rational.

The Ugly: Sleep

When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, focus, memory, and information processing speed are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Your brain is very fickle when it comes to sleep. For you to wake up feeling rested, your brain needs to move through an elaborate series of cycles. You can help this process along and improve the quality of your sleep by reducing your caffeine intake.

Here’s why you’ll want to: caffeine has a six-hour half-life, which means it takes a full twenty-four hours to work its way out of your system. Have a cup of joe at eight a.m., and you’ll still have 25% of the caffeine in your body at eight p.m. Anything you drink after noon will still be at 50% strength at bedtime. Any caffeine in your bloodstream—with the negative effects increasing with the dose—makes it harder to fall asleep.

When you do finally fall asleep, the worst is yet to come. Caffeine disrupts the quality of your sleep by reducing rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the deep sleep when your body recuperates and processes emotions. When caffeine disrupts your sleep, you wake up the next day with an emotional handicap. You’re naturally going to be inclined to grab a cup of coffee or an energy drink to try to make yourself feel better. The caffeine produces surges of adrenaline, which further your emotional handicap. Caffeine and lack of sleep leave you feeling tired in the afternoon, so you drink more caffeine, which leaves even more of it in your bloodstream at bedtime. Caffeine very quickly creates a vicious cycle.

Withdrawal

Like any stimulant, caffeine is physiologically and psychologically addictive. If you do choose to lower your caffeine intake, you should do so slowly under the guidance of a qualified medical professional. The researchers at Johns Hopkins found that caffeine withdrawal causes headache, fatigue, sleepiness, and difficulty concentrating. Some people report feeling flu-like symptoms, depression, and anxiety after reducing intake by as little as one cup a day. Slowly tapering your caffeine dosage each day can greatly reduce these withdrawal symptoms.