The Cool Kids Will Live Forever
Calm, per se, doesn’t appear in the taxonomy of those who study personality and temperament. People we might colloquially describe as calm are classified as low on the scale of neuroticism — a scale everyone is measured on, to a greater or lesser degree.
How much neuroticism anyone gets is determined largely by genetics. But it is also within our control. Psychiatrists and psychologists talk about emotional regulation — the ability to manage neuroticism so that even the most nervous of people can go through life appearing and feeling more in control than those genetically predisposed to calmness. [...]
Efforts to classify temperament go back to the four humors of the ancient Greeks (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood) and run through modern self-help shelves and quizzes in women’s magazines. Today, those who study personality tend to rank people on several scales, often called the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeability and neuroticism (some theorists identify them by different terms, but these offer the advantage of an acronym, Ocean). [...]
Of these, conscientiousness is often considered the least dependent on genes, and extroversion and openness the most. Neuroticism, the closest barometer of calmness, is also highly determined by inheritance. [...]
People tend to think that the confrontation produces the reaction; if you’re faced with an irrational rant, who can blame you for falling apart? But researchers in emotional regulation tease out a factor in between: how we think. Between the “a” of the antecedent and the “c” of the consequence, they argue, is the crucial “b,” for belief, which in the case of the person melting down might sound something like: my boss hates me, everyone hates me, I’m a total failure.
That is the opportunity for emotional regulation.
Professor Gross, at Stanford, outlines five methods. They are situation avoidance (steer clear of the boss); situation modification (turn your desk so you don’t have to look at the boss); attention deployment (when the boss invites you in for a chat, look at the wall, a picture, anything but his face); cognitive change (he’s a jerk anyway, what do I care what he thinks?); and finally, repression (concentrate on keeping your face still instead of blinking furiously or twitching in anger).
Link to The New York Times, The Cool Factor
November 12th, 2008
Like We’ve Learned Nothing
“‘My darling,’ said he, ‘I beg of you for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?’”
From The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
Number of French Psychiatric Theses on Hysteria
“Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood.
“The theory emerged in part from thinking about events other than mutations that can change gene behavior. And it suggests entirely new avenues of research, which, even if they prove the theory to be flawed, are likely to provide new insights into the biology of mental disease.
“Their idea is, in broad outline, straightforward. Dr. Crespi and Dr. Badcock propose that an evolutionary tug of war between genes from the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg can, in effect, tip brain development in one of two ways. A strong bias toward the father pushes a developing brain along the autistic spectrum, toward a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development. A bias toward the mother moves the growing brain along what the researchers call the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others’. This, according to the theory, increases a child’s risk of developing schizophrenia later on, as well as mood problems like bipolar disorder and depression.”
Continue reading at the New York Times. (Nov. 12, 2008)
Since ancient times women considered to be suffering from hysteria would sometimes undergo ‘pelvic massage’ — manual stimulation of the anterior wall of the vagina by the doctor until the patient experienced “hysterical paroxysm”. This deep psycho-emotional release is today referred to as the ‘g-spot’ or ‘female’ orgasm (see article orgasm), qualitatively different from ordinary genital (clitoral) orgasm.”
Continue reading at Wikipedia.