I’ve always been interested in what makes one’s individual style. It’s a curiosity of mine, which is linked to my job. As a teacher of Stylistics and Discourse Analysis, I should be able to detect those peculiarities that make a person’s individual style used in discourse. What I find interesting above all is to analyze the specific linguistic choices people make in order to encode their communicative intentions. Isn’t it interesting to know what these choices tell about them, about their ability to communicate across cultures, about their communicative intentions which quite often are hidden with the help of exquisite, sometimes extremely original, stylistic devices?
It’s great to be aware of these things when we want to become great communicators. However, knowing the linguistic forms and masterfully using them in discourse (both while encoding and decoding messages) is not enough. There are other factors influencing the communication process as well, like, for example, our emotional well-being, or in Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley’s words “the emotional life of our brains”. Although in their book they focused on how the brain’s unique patterns affect the way you think, feel, and live, and not on the way it affects communication, it is, I think, obvious that the process of thinking, or living, in general, is communication in action. We think via words, and definitely life is an ongoing process of communication in which we constantly try to relate to others and to understand ourselves in relation to others.
From the very first pages, it turned out that our brain has its own emotional style. The assumption is based on Richard Davidson’s extensive research on the human brain. He tried to prove that not only the unconscious is in charge of our emotions, but also our neocortex, the region which is said to be in charge of our reasoning and logic exclusively (the region that makes us believe we’re superior to other species as we suppose it enables us to be in control of our instincts, i.e. emotions). So, emotions do not live exclusively in the limbic system, they feel at home in the prefrontal cortex, and this might mean that we can manage them, definitely, if only we knew how. And the answer can be found in the book.
According to Richard Davidson, there are six dimensions of a person’s emotional style. They are: outlook, resilience, social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context, and attention. But let’s first try to understand what a dimension is. Somehow this word implies that something can be measured. So, it looks like it is possible to determine the length, width, height, or depth of our emotions. Something that might appear impossible at first sight. But the renowned psychologist managed to convince his readers that indeed the intensity of emotions can be measured. The very fact that during his experiments he got interesting results showing how the emotions of the respondents varied allowed him to arrive at the conclusion that each person possesses their own individual emotional style. Thus, it is rather wrong to generalize and think that people respond either positively or negatively with equal intensity.
This can be easily proven. Think of something that you really like, a book or a film, and then you express all your feelings about it to your friend. Then you discover that your friend also liked it but not in the same way as you did. Their response was not that ecstatic. Another situation to consider is when you feel quite awkward in a company you don’t know and you want to hide. It’s difficult for you to interact with people. Whereas, somebody you know becomes easily the heart of a company of totally unknown people. Or the way one experiences a loss is very different among people. Some recover quite easily, whereas others need a lot of time to pass to be able to move on.
The good news is that none of these people are defective. Everything is absolutely OK with them. They simply stand at different dimensions of their emotional style. Let’s take the resilience dimension. Those who are at the Fast to Recover extreme will recover faster from a loss than those who are at the Slow to Recover extreme. People who are at the Positive Type extreme of the outlook dimension are always happy and extremely optimistic, whereas those who are at the Negative Type extreme would be cynical and prone to see everything in a negative light. Those who are keenly aware of the context in which they are and can appropriately respond to it are at the Tuned In extreme of the sensitivity to context dimension, but those who can’t read the socio-cultural rules characteristic of a certain context are at the Tuned Out extreme. Now, those who acutely feel every single message the body sends them are at the Self-Aware extreme of the self-awareness dimension; those who can’t are at the Self-Opaque extreme. People who can stay focused and nothing can disturb them are at the Focused Style extreme of the attention dimension; those who can’t focus at all are at the Unfocused extreme. Finally, people who are at the Socially Intuitive extreme of the social intuition dimension can easily pick up the others’ mental and emotional states, but those who are completely blind to these states (they simply can’t read them in the others) are at Puzzled extreme.
Now you might think that a person who is at the extreme end of fast to recover, positive type, tuned it, self-aware, focused, and socially intuitive, has the best social emotional style. Such a person is the happiest and luckiest on earth, you would exclaim. Richard Davidson encourages us not to jump to hasty conclusions and think again. As known, extremism in all its forms is dangerous, and this is true about our emotions as well. Being at the positive type extreme of the outlook dimension can actually be quite dangerous, and the psychologist proves this by providing strong arguments. The lesson to be learned is that we should strive to be somewhere in the middle of all the six dimensions. Indeed, nothing is better in life than being able to find the middle way in every puzzling situation. So, it looks like it is also true about a person’s emotional style. Being able to find the balance is the recipe to an emotionally stable person. And we know that our mental health is the drive for our success and happiness in life.
Now if you’re curious to find out your own emotional style, you answer the ten questions for each emotional style from the book and see where you fall on that spectrum. The results I got were surprising. I’ve also learned (and this is the good news) we are able to move from one dimension to another. Our brain allows us to make changes in the neural connections and become more balanced. This can be achieved with the help of meditation or exercises from cognitive behavioral therapy. It is so easy actually that it is almost unbelievable. The trick is that one has to be patient and consistent in order to succeed. It is possible to make this change. It is possible to improve your emotional style. This will definitely contribute to one’s success in communication as well, enabling them to feel socially connected.
Falling in English with You :) 