Curated by: The IOC Team
Director's Corner
-
As emotions are generated deep in the brain, the emotional experience feels personal. Emotions are like an endlessly changing stream of internal music on the lone voyage of the self.
Yet, without other people the brain would not be able to generate the emotions that we claim so adamantly as our own. In her book How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that our emotions are both a social and cultural construction that emerge from our interactions with each other and the culture around us.
Language is a perfect example of a cultural construction. In many languages, there are words for emotions that do not exist in others. Many of you reading this right now are able to think of several words in your native language or in a second language which the English language doesn’t define.
If a concept for an emotion does not exist in a language, does that mean that this emotion is not felt? Feldman Barrett argues that yes, language has a direct impact on emotional granularity - the ability to identify and name emotions with specificity.
If a culture does not have a word for an emotion, it is more difficult to reference this emotion in our personal experience or in conversation with another person.
An absence of words for a wide variety of emotions in one’s vocabulary, can reduce emotional granularity. Therefore, we could all benefit from learning foreign emotion concepts to increase our emotional literacy.
On December 8, Lisa Feldman Barrett will join us for a public webinar on The New Scientific Understanding of Emotion, in which we’ll explore a radically new scientific understanding of what emotions are, how they are made, how they work, and how to navigate one’s emotional life.
Let’s Expand the Emotion Constructs of the IOC Community
There is substantial evidence that emotional granularity is closely linked to linguistic granularity. The more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain can identify what’s happening in the body and calibrate your brain’s resources and demands accordingly.
Studies show that people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness.
We can increase each other's emotional granularity by sharing the language constructs that are unique to our own cultures. We invite you to share an emotional construct that is unique to your native language or a second languages. We will create a resource for our community with all the emotion constructs shared. In doing so we will help each other become more emotionally granular.
With gratitude for this amazing community,
The IOC Team
Featured Research
-
Share /Blair Johnson and Rebecca Acabchuk completed a review (2018) titled: What are the keys to a longer, happier life? Answers from five decades of health psychology research. They set out to share the field’s history, main themes and prominent findings, noting: “Health psychology emerged in recent decades as an important contributor to a broader effort aimed to ameliorate the most pressing health-related issues in the world today: health, medical care, stress and coping, and how best to prevent, treat, and/or manage chronic disease.”
-
Share /While there is an abundance of stressful or low moments for all of us in pandemic time, coaches are also experiencing peak moments in coaching. What is a peak coaching moment? Czech authors Honsová and Jarošová published a lovely qualitative paper on peak coaching experiences (2018). Here is a summary of the research, as well as actionable tips for coaches.
-
Share /What if it turns out that we don’t know much what about what others are feeling now or what they will feel in the future? Thanks to the groundbreaking work and theory developed by psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who presented at our 2019 conference, we are learning that emotions (akin to the weather) are constructed anew in every moment by our brains predictions, not triggered by what’s happening or fitting into consistent categories like anger, fear, or sadness. Further, by naming others’ emotions, we can disrupt their own experience of emerging emotions and the meaning the emotions convey.
Sponsor
-
The Co-Active Training Institute (CTI) is creating transformative change in the way people relate to and work with each other. CTI is the largest and oldest coach training and leadership development organization in the world—and the only program to teach its ground-breaking Co-Active Model. CTI was the very first organization accredited by the International Coach Federation (ICF), has trained over 65,000 coaches worldwide, and today trains more new coaches each year than any other training program.
CTI helps coaches and leaders around the globe navigate toward stronger relationships, integral solutions, and creating meaningful impact in the world. The work CTI does goes beyond training. Participants are guided through ground-breaking, contextually relevant learning experiences that ignite transformation and a lifelong commitment to expressing leadership.
Co-Active Professional Coach Training & Certification: The Co-Active Professional Coach Training series is widely recognized as the most rigorous professional coach training and certification program in the industry. This program will prepare you to coach anyone with confidence, on any topic, supported by the Co-Active Model, which is known as the most flexible and proven model in the coaching world.
https://coactive.com/training/coach-training/Co-Active Leadership Training: Today’s leaders need to be agile, collaborative, and, most importantly, relationship-focused—able to connect with, engage, and empower employees. Co-Active creates a new language of leadership that’s transforming business, organizations, and communities throughout the world. https://coactive.com/training/leadership-training/
Co-Active Coaching Toolkit: Get resources such as performance awareness appraisals, job performance wheels, corporate client profiles, corporate client discovery checklists, and more.
https://learn.coactive.com/toolkit-registration
The Co-Active Model from CTI on Vimeo.