How to Build Social & Emotional Intelligence | Dr. Ralph Adolphs & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Reading The Room

00:00building uh social intelligence and emotional intelligence because we define that different ways. People who seem unable to read the room, so to speak, versus people who are hyper sensitive to other people's emotions, not necessarily responding to them, but they're really in tune.

00:14I'll go out on a limb and say that some of the happiest, most functional, and when I say functional, I also include in that they take great care of the people around them, their families, their co-workers, people that I know and have observed are not super emotionally in tune with the emotions of others.

00:33Meaning, it doesn't seem like they're clocking every little nuance. And some of the more I'm generalizing here, less functional, more labile people that I've known are really in tune with like what everyone in the room is feeling, who did this, who didn't do that.

00:47And going back to our our earlier conversation that so much of how we gauge other people's emotions is an integration over, you know, how how often they tend to acknowledge us when they when we walk down the hall. If the first time I met you, you walked right by me, which who knows what would have happened.

01:01And the second time and the third time, and then the fourth time you say, "Good morning," I'd say, "Oh, Lex is a really delightful person." If you did the opposite, said hello, hello, hello three days in a row and stop four time just like looked looked at me and brushed right by, I'd probably think like that's weird, you know?

01:16So, there's some advantage actually to not being in tune with all the subtle cues of everyone around us. What in the brain is known about a social awareness, about reading the room? We talk it up these days because indeed empathy is important, but this is a tricky one.

01:34I'm going to get some heat for saying this, but there's also a lot to be said for like walking into a room, acknowledging, okay, great. And then like getting your work done. You don't want to be wrapped up into people's emotional states because unnecessarily because they're labile, they're all over the place.

01:49It's there's a cost. Well, I think it's extremely heterogeneous. And so this is not sort of one sizefits-all and there's not one type of sort of emotional intelligence skill that fits all occasions and many

Variability & Flexibility

02:02different kinds can work. They depend on the context. They depend on the circumstances. Initially when James Gross had emotional regulation, it was sort of focused on some basic mechanisms like suppression, reappraisal, acceptance. And now the big two topics on emotional regulation are variability and flexibility.

02:21So there's not just one way, but you need to be able to have many many different options and you can vary vary your emotion regulation responses. But the other big part of emotion regulation, which is obvious once you think about it for any any parent would think about it, is it's interpersonal.

02:38It's between people. You regulate other people's emotions and you have to pick up on other people's emotions and you influence other people's emotions. It's a birectional interaction. And so I think a big part of emotional intelligence comes from being able to read that probably in a fairly automatic way and in a context dependent way.

02:57And depending on the context, it can be the case that what's most adaptive is if you really get involved with other people and you really talk to them a lot, you're very empathic or you just take over and that can work too depending on the circumstances.

03:11So there are multiple strategies and I think for any of these social intelligence, emotional regulation, any of these sort of metacognitive skills, the most successful skill is if you don't just have one, but you have variety and you can switch between them and you can use context to switch between those.

03:28Just like physiological heart rate variability, you don't want to train to just be able to have a low heart rate. You want to be able to train to have a variable, a big range. Same thing with emotions. What's most adaptive is being able to have a big range of emotions and being able to switch adaptively depending on the context between them.

03:48And I think that's where, you know, real long-term context dependent social intelligence for people that really come out ahead. It's not one tiny slice where

Physician Who Switches

03:57they do well and don't do well in lots of other circumstances. It's the ability to be really adaptive and flexible and switch around which requires a a a keen sense of oneself like where we are in our internal state and a keen sense of of context.

04:12In fact, I observed a really impressive physician recently like moving through the hospital environment. I mean he was just like all agency to to but then with the patient it was as if he dropped into a bubble. You know the patient was understandably a little nervous about what was to come and and it was remarkable.

04:28I was like, "Okay, that is superb bedside manner." But then it comes time to do the actual work and that's not a time for emotion. It's just like 100 you have to be able to 100% like I mean the the life and well-being of the patient relies on being absolutely focused on the task at hand.

04:46I mean it's it's related again to the presumptive um association between emotional granularity what Lisa Fman Barrett pioneered decades ago the ability to differentiate and be aware of all the variety of emotions in you and emotion regulation flexibility that you're able to adopt many different emotion regulation strategies but in order to do so you need the emotional granularity to be able to be aware of all the different emotions that are going on in the first It's probably two things.

05:16One is an ability to differentiate at a very fine grain and the other one is to step back and have some kind of metacognitive oversight and control. So you can see

Scientists On The Spectrum

05:26okay here's this full spectrum of things I could do and you can take a look at all of those incorporate the context and pick one the one path amongst many that you could take that's the most adaptive. It's interesting. Some of my favorite scientists are very emotive people.

05:39And then some of my favorite scientists, thinking of one in particular when I was down at UC San Diego when my lab was there. Most people probably label as a little bit on the spectrum. I won't mention his name. He would walk into a faculty meeting where someone else was presenting and he would say out loud to me like sitting there like, "Is this any good?"

05:57And I have encountered people like that, too. And you know, it's very disconcerting when you're giving the talk. It's disconcerting when you're giving the talk. But I was going to say there's also something incredibly refreshing about it because it's almost like they're they're asking the question that they they need to ask.

06:11You're a little embarrassed for them, but you're but it's liberating. You feel like ah we've broken the social mold here a little bit and someone would say excuse me so and so and so is presenting be like oh sorry and then we'll just sit down and then listen.

06:24I mean they're entirely polite very actively engaged in the conversation but I sometimes wish like how cool would that be? Like I'm sure there's a cost other areas in life, but how cool would that be? You lose. This person has a little bit less context dependent, you know, flexibility around emotions.

06:41And I have to imagine that they move through life in a way that's kind of like liberated. Well, they wouldn't have this huge cognitive load all the time, you know, if you extremely smart. Now, that's correlative, right? But like incredible actually a physicist turned neuroscientist.

06:54And I just thought, man, that's pretty cool. And then the more you go into engineering and science fields, the more of these people you encounter. This is true. You see fewer of these people in the performing arts for instance. Sure. My lab studies autism amongst other things.

07:08And you certainly would have the case that as a spectrum, yes indeed, you would have mathematicians, engineers, lots of people who are very successful who are on the spectrum to some extent. And I think, you know, coming back to what you were saying, it's sort of liberating or simplifying.

07:21If you had to

Cognitive Load Of Social Rules

07:24really effortully, cognitively think about how to regulate your social behavior and make all the right moves and not offend anybody, you were worried about that all the time, it would be overwhelming. And I think it is overwhelming for many people with autism that you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be relatively effortless and automatic.

07:42It has to become automatic at some level and then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way. And that's what's difficult for many people with autism that they lack that part. They can compensate to some extent, but the cognitive load starts really being an impediment because if you have to track everything, you have to remember, okay, I should make eye contact, I have to remember turn taking, if you have to cognitively remember all those things, it's just overwhelming.

08:07So, you have to be able to somehow have it be automatic at some level.