Emotions are Contagious

In the book “Emotional Intelligence” Daniel Goleman shared an incident of Vietnam war when a group of six monks walked straight towards the line of fire without looking left or right amidst an open fire. They were so calm and quiet that soldiers fighting in that location couldn’t understand their behavior and they just stopped fighting.

One of the soldier recalls the incident.

It was really strange, because nobody shot at ’em. And after they walked over the berm, suddenly all the fight was out of me. It just didn’t feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just stopped fighting.

David Busch, Vietnam veteran

If something as intense as war can be over by literally doing nothing but walking in silence, we should pause for a moment and think carefully of what impact we can make by carefully placing our emotions in right place at the right time. Becoming angry in response to anger is trivial and it fuels anger itself and since it’s contagious it spreads like every other emotion. Try spreading the feeling of gratitude, try spreading happiness for a change and trust me like every other emotion they’ll spread too.

Filed under: Daily posts

Michael Stevens, The Vsauce Guy

Science of Getting Angry

The Psychology of Evil

Philip Zimbardo talks about the psychology of evil in one of his TED talks. It was one of the most intense TED videos I have ever seen(link here). In his early days at Stanford, he did some experiments on innocent people to test if the evil in them is surfaced or not given a certain situation. What he found out that people from every walk of life behaved almost all the same meaning their evilness was surfaced and it was pretty ugly.

He shared the similarity between his experiment and an event occurred in Abu Ghraib Detention Center Iraq, and the images were very disturbing. The conclusion was that given a situation we have a choice but it’s not a simple one (and most of us fall in the slippery slope of evil). He also shared how people with authority uses their power to bring out evil in us(it was scary but true).

The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.

Philip Zimbardo

He ended on a note that we should live a life as if we are a “hero-in-waiting” because every once in a while we are thrown into a situation where we have to act on behalf of others and at that point in life we become the hero of our life if we act.

 

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Finding Dory

“Interpretation of Dreams” by Sigmund Freud

Today I started reading another book and this one is by Sigmund Freud. It is one of the first few books which he wrote in his early days called “Interpretation of Dreams”. It is a research-based book consisting of references from various other authors who had worked in this field.

What drove me to read this book?

Every book which consists of psychological facts and examples refer something from Sigmund Freud and I have got references of Sigmund Freud in every other book I read and it raised my curiosity to the point that I really wanted to read something directly from him.

I only have finished a couple of chapters though and to tell you the truth the experience is very different from reading modern days books. The writing style is far more formal and direct than today’s books. Let’s see how the rest of book goes, I will share my learning from the book in subsequent posts.

Filed under: Book learning, Daily posts Tagged: anideaaday, booklearning

One Year Blog Anniversary