The Brain & Parental Rejection, 2

Parental acceptance of a child is critical to the development of healthy, trusting relationships with others in adulthood. Speaking of the emotional pain that occurs from parental rejection, Professor Rohner, co-author of the study said: “Unlike physical pain, people can psychologically re-live the emotional pain of rejection over and over for years …In our half-century of international research, we’ve not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent effect on personality and personality development as does the experience of rejection, especially by parents in childhood.” The good news is that a person can recover if he or she is willing to identify the rejection as a parental problem, grieve the loss of healthy parenting and recover, work through the emotional trauma that resulted, raise his or her level of emotional intelligence, and choose to build some solid, trusting, relationships.

The Brain & Parental Rejection

Research at the University of Connecticut, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, showed that regardless of race, culture, or gender, most people (children as well as adults) tended to have a similar response when they perceived rejection from their parents or caregivers. Rejection by either parent is traumatic for children. However, since fathers tend to be viewed as having more power or higher prestige, rejection by a father can be harder on you and can cause more long-lasting emotional damage than being rejected by your mother. As a result, such children tend to become more anxious and insecure and may also become more hostile and aggressive towards others. The emotional pain generated from the rejection registers in the same part of the brain as physical pain and can remain into adulthood, preventing the individual from developing strong, trusting relationships with other adults. This can negatively impact their own life in a myriad of differing ways unless the person chooses to actively recover. More tomorrow.

Brain & Social Insurance, 3

Using the bank account metaphor for social insurance, the bad news is that apparently the brain does not wipe out negative balances at the end of the day, but instead carries them over to your next interaction with a given individual. This means that you can end the day not just being at zero but actually “in the red” with someone, which can add interest, if you will, to your emotional debt in their minds. Conversely, you can end the day with money in their bank. Leaving social interactions with positive outcomes is like adding money to their bank account, which tends to build trust, and may even resemble gaining interest in the deposit you made to your bank account with them.

Brain & Social Insurance, 2

Building social insurance in like making small deposits in a bank account that gradually accumulate and build trust between individuals. If you focus on trying to avoid making mistakes in social interactions, this can actually create a sense of anxiety, which can backfire as you attempt to provide four or five positives for each negative impact. In addition, small and even subtle positives appear to have the same effect as big positives. Therefore, finding ways to make many small positive impacts is likely to be the best way to approach social insurance. These could include smiling, using genuine mirthful laughter together, letting someone go first in line, sending a kind message encouraging someone who is going for an interview or facing a tough challenge at work, or sending a short text saying, “Thanks for inviting me to lunch. It was fun and I had a good time.” More tomorrow.

Brain & Social Insurance

Since Emotional Intelligence is such an important part of success—and since it is so often misunderstood—“Social Insurance” may be another practical way to understand this. Research by John Gottman and colleagues at the University of Washington (in an attempt to gain more understanding about relationships and how they function) found that brains apparently keep an informal count of behaviors and categorize them as positive or negative. Think of this as a positive-negative emotional bank account that resides in each brain. And it isn’t just tit-for-tat, either. It’s more than keeping an equal score of positive versus negative behaviors. Social insurance indicates that you need to keep a balance of at least four or five positive behaviors to every negative behavior in order to maintain good relationships. More tomorrow.

IQ and Corporal Punishment (CP), 2

In general, children tend to find spanking highly stressful and the experience(s) can leave them with a number of deleterious outcomes:

• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• A tendency to startle easily
• An ongoing dread of bad things happening.

 The benefits of discipline for misbehavior that avoids spanking appear to include:

• A reduction in juvenile delinquency
• Less adult violence
• Less masochistic sexual activity
• An increased probability of completing higher education and earning a higher income
• Lower rates of depression and alcohol abuse

 There are ways to discipline that reduce the likelihood of these negative outcomes, but they take careful thought and time to implement. Most parents would like their children to be smart and successful. Avoiding spanking and dealing with misbehavior in other more functional and effective ways can help make that more likely to happen. If you want smarter and more successful children, such strategies are worth it.

IQ and Corporal Punishment (CP)

There is an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of corporal punishment in raising children and adolescents. Researchers have found a link between spanking and IQ levels:

·                     Children who were spanked in childhood have lower IQs

·                     The more children were spanked, the slower the development of their mental ability and the lower their IQ level

·                     Countries in which spanking children was more common saw stronger links between corporal punishment and IQ

·                     The IQ of children 2–4 years old who were not spanked was 5 points higher when tested four years later than those who were spanked.

·                     Corporal punishment experienced into the teenage years may hamper brain development even more.

More tomorrow