Sensible stuff

[nancylebov]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gottman05/gottman05_index.html

John Gottmans's been researching relationships, including physiological changes while the partners interact....

It seemed that relationships last to the extent that you select someone whose annoying personality traits don't send you into emotional orbit.

...there's an intimate connection between what's happening to the autonomic nervous system and what happening in the brain, and how well people can take in information — how well they can just process information — for example, just being able to listen to your partner — that is much harder when your heart rate is above the intrinsic rate of the heart, which is around a hundred to a hundred and five beats a minute for most people with a healthy heart.

This backs up an intuition I've had for a very long time--that people can't think when they're angry. A lot of my personal style is based on the desire to have people calm enough that they're capable of thinking.

I've noticed a recent contradiction, though--the above means that I try to be very careful with my own anger. It's as though I'm trying to take complete control of the anger problem, and it's possible that I need a more sophisticated strategy.

Link gotten from dglenn.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

The most effective communicators are the ones who get others into a desired emotional state; this can mean making them calm or passionate or angry, depending on the speaker's aim. That's a skill which seems to be in short supply in fandom.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

So far as fandom is concerned, I suspect what you're seeing is what I call "the absence of the sales temperment", and I find that absence rather restful.

On the other hand, I'm not good at inspiring people, and rather regret that.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about "sales temperament," but, strewth, it's more than sales; madfilkentist is right that this is the basis of strong communication in general. People aren't actually reasoning animals, we're emotional animals that can also reason a bit. It's all about the brain physiology and chemistry we've inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

So what can you do about it? "Remaining calm" is good, it does allow more reasoning to happen. But learning to understand what puts others into a more receptive state can be learned. It's a learnable skill, that's what the whole "neurolinguistic programming" movement (itself a descendant of Korzybski's General Semantics) was about - despite its terrible, manipulative-sounding name, it's actually about a kind of highly integral communication, one that maximizes the chance that what you're saying will be heard and received rather than reacted to. (I'm not a shill for NLP, by the way; I learned some useful stuff from it and moved on.)

The advantage of anger is....

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

...it can allow you to single-handedly and in bare feet and jockey shorts wake up when four guys invade your house and beat two of them up while scaring the other two into running away.


This was my therapist's story about his burglary after I told him about mine. He's a gay guy about 5'6". The attackers were big guys.

Anger is not for formulating rational arguments, but it's profoundly useful if you're going to take your attackers with you if they don't give up.

Re: The advantage of anger is....

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've come to the conclusion that anger is what fuels territorial defense.

I make these distinctions: anger is "this must be stopped", hate is "this must be destroyed", fury is "something must be destroyed".

However, there's no practical way to restrict anger to the defense of physical territory. Frex, I was in a low-quality argument last weekend--
by the time the guy I was talking with said that he didn't approve of women fighters in sf "because it doesn't make sense to fight in a bikini", I was angry enough to ask him what the fuck he was talking about. It turned out that he wasn't going to make a distinction between the text and (a probably oversimplified) notion of the cover illo.

As I recall, I walked away not long after that. My feeling is that there is some way to handle anger during arguments so that it leads to better thought and rhetoric rather than worse.

Re: The advantage of anger is....

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

When I lived in Berkeley, I overheard an argument in Greek between a man and a woman. The man was using vaguely physically threatening body language; the woman was using vaguely sexual body language (like "agree with me or you'll never see these tits again). They went on for a good ten minutes. Then someone with them said, "But it's only ice cream."

I think some of the problem is that we still aren't living completely in our cerebral cortexes. Excitement, even intellectual excitement, tend to end up sexualized (a friend in Virginia said that often after making exciting scientific discoveries, he'd find himself aroused). Low quality arguments (think Usenet) are about dominance (anger as a part of that, too -- dominance displays are a way of avoiding physical fights). (Usenet also has verbal forms of territorial defense that can be as toxic.

Your opponent may have simply felt he had a right to dominate women. He didn't want them fighting in his books or on the covers of his books; he wasn't going to accept an explanation from a woman that made a distinction between the two.