[Applause]
when we put on the TV or listen to the
radio to get some news so often these
days we’re confronted with something
like this war terror fighting
international disputes conflict even in
our own lives we argue with our partners
we bicker with our kids we fallout with
our co-workers so what if we could learn
a way to handle conflict that was a
little bit kinder to everybody concerned
that had more likelihood of leading to a
so let’s think about actually what
happens when we experience a conflict
when we experience conflict we
experience stress we may not recognize
it as such openly or consciously but our
body certainly knows and a physiological
response kicks in which releases
hormones cortisol and what-have-you
in order to prepare the body for some
kind of protective response now for some
people that is to fight and it can be
literally fighting back physically or
maybe verbally in the words they use for
other people the responses to fly is
flight so to literally one away or to
metaphorically run away in some way by
ignoring the situation refusing to
engage in it just burying their head in
the sand for other people
the dilemma and the fear is such that
they totally freeze like a rabbit in the
headlights and really can’t deal with
the situation at all but all of those
responses although they may CV very
instinctive don’t always lead to very
good outcome so good sometimes
perpetuate the conflict even further so
what I’m going to propose to you tonight
is that rather than responding to a
conflict like that we learn a little bit
more about emotional intelligence so
what is emotional intelligence well
academically speaking there’s been quite
a lot of conceptualizations but they all
have several things in common and in a
very small nutshell emotional
intelligence
about identifying an understanding
emotion firstly in ourselves so how are
we actually feeling her I’d get any
given moment and you might be thinking I
know how I feel but do you really in the
chaos of every day that conflicted
deadlines the rushing about it’s so easy
to lose touch with what we really feel
and then when we’ve learned to
authentically identify what we’re really
feeling and how it is influenced by the
situation you’re in then we can learn to
think about and control how we respond
so we can learn to regulate those
emotions and respond to how we choose to
rather than just instinctively but
emotional intelligence isn’t just about
us it’s about other people as well
because when we start to really
understand emotion we could start to
think about how that applies to the
other person in the situation as well
how might they be feeling what my going
on for them that is making them to
behave the way they are and once we
start to have understanding of that then
we can learn to regulate not only our
only behavior and responses but we can
learn to regulate and manage the
situation
and facilitate a place whereby the other
people can respond in perhaps a more
now emotional intelligence is a great
thing first to have conflict aside we
have a whole load of evidence in
psychology of how people with high
emotional intelligence are more
optimistic and happier than people with
lower emotional intelligence their
health is better now not surprisingly
their mental health is better they
report less anxiety less depression but
also their physical somatic health is
better the people with lower emotional
intelligence high emotional intelligence
people perform well in their jobs
they’re happier in their jobs they work
well with their colleagues and their job
performance is better than low emotional
intelligence people across a whole load
of organizational criteria they do
better academically as well in fact we
have evidence to suggest that kids in
school who
got a relatively low IQ but high
emotional intelligence can actually end
up outperforming kids with much higher
IQs so emotional intelligence can
actually have a compensator effect for
for parts of us that are perhaps a
little bit weaker so we have all of this
great evidence for really good real-life
outcomes for people with high emotional
intelligence now most of that evidence
has been gathered from psychological
studies carried out using questionnaires
but we’ve been starting to wonder about
how good it would be to get some actual
behavioral evidence of some of these
effects some behavioral evidence that
people with high emotional intelligence
are actually better and quicker at
sussing out emotional situations and
understanding them the people with lower
emotional intelligence and recently I’ve
been doing some work on this with some
of my colleagues here at Plymouth
University some of whom are sitting in
the audience over there and what we’ve
been doing for this research is using
virtual reality so quite new technology
so we’ve been putting our participants
in a virtual reality headset a bit like
this now I don’t know if anybody here
has ever been or used in what virtual
reality headset but if you haven’t I
could tell you that it completely
immerses you in an alternative 3d world
whatever world or environment with
program that headsets put you in and if
you have trouble imagining what that’s
like
just think about walking through some
kind of environment you’re familiar with
say your own home so you walk through
that space and you can see stuff around
you doors and chairs and tables and
windows and what have you and you can
navigate your way through that 3d space
and interact with objects
well 3d immersive visual reality is just
like that it’s like actually being in
that environment and interacting with it
so what we’ve done in this study is
we’ve put people into an environment a
bit like this so a city street at night
now it’s got all the usual things you’d
expect to see on the city streets at
night it’s got cars and lights
shops and pavement with people walking
up and down and in this study what we’d
be doing is every now and again one of
these people out on the street will walk
up these avatars will walk up to the
person taking part who of course feels
like they’re actually really there and
they’ll either be really pleasant
friendly in their approach so hey how
are you really great to see you you’re
looking well or another avatar might
come up and be really aggressive and
unfriendly Oh what you doing here I hate
people like you so what we asked our
participants to do was respond to these
avatars appropriately either by shaking
their hands in terms of the pleasant
friendly avatars or by punching the ones
that were aggressive and we gave them a
joystick so when they’re shaking hands
they can pull back on the joystick or
when they’re punching somebody that can
push forward forcefully on it so really
quite an embodied experience and I’ve
had a go at this I’d like to tell you
it’s fun and its really cathartic if
you’ve had a bad day and those avatars
go down really hard onto the street it
is very satisfying indeed some of them
are really quite irritating and what did
we find what we found so far and this
study is still going on is that people
who score highly on measures of
emotional intelligence perform this task
much much more quickly the people lower
in emotional intelligence now if you
think about the nature of the task what
you’ve got to do it’s given that the the
avatars are all coming at you randomly
at different times you’ve got to stop
think how is this person sort of
treating me and how should I respond
appropriately it seems like a simple
task but we’re measuring their responses
in milliseconds and the emotional
intelligence people are much quicker but
it gets much more interesting when we
ask people to do this in an incongruent
condition so a situation where they’re
asked to respond an incongruent way to
the approach there are other words they
punch the nice people and shake hands
with the nice with the nasty ones now
obviously for anybody you probably don’t
think about the process you go through
but that involves a little bit more
social processing because you have to
think hang on how’s
is person treating me and you have to
regulate and control any prepotent
response to say punch a nasty person and
instead respond in the way we’ve asked
you to and again what we find is that
people with high emotional intelligence
responds appropriately a lot more
quickly than those with low emotional
intelligence so the fact that they are
able to make this social judgement and
give the responsibly I’ve asked them to
give so quickly suggests that that whole
judgment process is a hell of a lot
easier for them and not only do they
respond more quickly they make fewer
errors as well than the people who are
lower in emotional intelligence and
maybe don’t find it so easy to suss out
the situation and respond quickly so
that’s just some research we’re involved
in at the moment and it’s a really new
and exciting and novel way to look at
everyday behaviors involved with
emotional intelligence so you might
think great people who are hired
emotional intelligence they have all
these great positive life outcomes they
treat people well everything would be
wonderful if we were all emotional
intelligent but not necessarily which
brings me on to the dark side we’ve got
a growing amount of evidence to suggest
that some people who have high emotional
intelligence don’t use those skills in
nice friendly kind pro-social ways
instead they use them in more malignant
and malignant and insidious ways to meet
their own ends at the expense of other
people and this manifests usually in the
form of some form of emotional
manipulation so let’s think of a couple
of examples who remembers this kind of
scenario at school even if you weren’t
directly involved yourself you probably
saw it going on situations where groups
of girls would sort of exclude another
one and whisper behind her back and of
course these days we’ve all got social
media and technology to make the
situation worse well from my own
research I found that a lot of these
girls at the back the Mean Girls doing
the whisper and excluding are very often
those that are high in emotional
intelligence
and they’re doing it because they
understand what makes the other girl
tick they know what buttons to press to
make her upset and they want for
whatever reason that they want that to
happen they want her to be excluded from
the social group
another example is leadership business
we’ve also got research to show that
while some people make good progress in
business or in the workplace by good
management good business sense leading
and inspiring and what-have-you
other people get ahead in business
through emotional manipulation through
playing one person in the team off
against another and sneaking around
behind people’s backs in a very suface
sort of way so you might think why why
is it when you’ve got these skills of
emotional intelligence some people
choose to use them in that kind of way
well we don’t know a lot about this yet
it’s a relatively new area of research
but so far the evidence seems to suggest
that it’s because of certain other
personality traits that those
individuals possess now if I say the
word psychopathy to you what you think
of something like this indeed when I
wanted this photograph I stuck
psychopathy into Google and this was one
of many images that popped up but the
vast majority of people by far that have
some psychopathic personality traits
aren’t like this they’re not crazed
killers covered in blood they’re not
serial killers they don’t murderous
they’re not all locked up in Broadmoor
most of them are moving within er around
us and beside us all the time they’re in
our workplaces our gyms the pub we may
even be married to one and a lot of
these people on the surface seem
perfectly reasonable decent nice often
very charming and likable people and
what we don’t see underneath is that
really they’re quite cold they’re quite
callous and they don’t really care very
much for other people or how they feel
or how they get hurt or trampled on all
they care about
is meeting their own ends so the end
justifies the means for those
individuals they are very much your
so you might say to yourself if I asked
this question would the world be a
better place a nicer place if we’re all
more emotionally intelligent and you
might say well no because these
psychopathic people are always gonna be
among us and of course they are yeah
they’re always gonna be among us just
like they’ve always been among us
throughout history but that doesn’t mean
that the rest of us shouldn’t try and my
challenge to you tonight is to stop now
for one moment I just think about how
you’re feeling how do you feel right now
really are you happy sad bored inspired
just gagging for a glass of wine at
break time that lasts wants me by the
way I’ll admit to it how do you really
feel because you know emotional
intelligence although like most
personality traits it’s partly heritable
we can learn it if we find we’re not
really very good in social situations
and we become aware of that we can learn
to become more emotionally intelligent
and the first step the first step is to
understand how we are really
authentically feeling at any given
moment and once we start to understand
that then we can learn to control and
regulate a fight fight flare fear or
whatever response we would naturally
make so it starts with us I’m not saying
that by being more emotionally
intelligence as as individual you’ll
bring about world peace it would be
great if we kill it but it doesn’t mean
that we can’t try to be more emotionally
intelligent in our own lives to
understand and manage emotions and
emotional conflict situations to be
kinder to everyone involved so as I say
my challenge to you tonight is to think
a little bit more about being
emotionally intelligent
and next time you get into a conflict
situation stop think about how you feel
and how do you want to respond and how
what kind of response would show the
world the people the person rather that
you really want to show the world the
person you really want to be and you
really want to punch that irritating
person’s lights out or would you rather
shake their hand thank you
[Music]
[Applause] [Music]