Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Making Sense of Emotion: Innovating Emotional Intelligence

Children not shown tools to develop emotional intelligence fail emotionally and socially. Basic empathy skills are absent. In adult life, employment and occupational advancement are less likely. Making Sense of Emotion grasps the Yale integrative emotional intelligence ability model. Adding key missing elements, this book unlocks its potential to trigger "emotion performance utilization" in real life and real-time. The epidemic of overusing medications, substance use disorders, addiction, drug overdoses, even global "doping" in sports reflects emotional malaise. Emotional illiteracy is one underlying cause and demands innovative emotional intelligence. Written by a psychiatrist, this volume supplies literacy tools---a vivid action language showing how emotions unfold as personal dramas. Emotions are our first language---the mother tongue infants and children are "lived by." Emotional awareness is refined emotional intelligence. This book clearly defines emotions, feelings, affects, moods, and the social-emotional competencies needed to understand and build emotional awareness. Skills take shape resulting in unfolding self-attunement. In real-time, emotional intelligence is effective emotional performance. The missing link between the two is the application of emotion regulation in real life---knowledge in the head displayed in skilled everyday behavior. Innovative ideas in this book explain how to apply this emotional hygiene fitness program to benefit children and adults. Review Emotions are complex states that involve consciousness, our bodies, our brains, our social and physical surroundings, our cultures, and much more. The complexity of emotions, and the abundance of approaches and theories regarding them, has led several brain scientists and other experts in emotions research to propose comprehensive and universal frameworks to explain them. Consider, for example, Jaak Panksepp's Affective Neuroscience (2004) and, more recently, Elizabeth Johnson and Leah Olson's The Feeling Brain (CH, Dec'15, 53-1773). Ninivaggi, who also wrote Envy Theory (CH, May'11, 48-5388) and Biomental Child Development (2013), has a clinical background and takes a wide-ranging approach. Specifically, he integrates definitions of emotion as particular brain states and feeling states with concepts derived from emotional intelligence and emotional literacy--translating emotions into insights on solvable life problems and skills that can be mastered. He thus promotes emotional well-being under the old rubric of "emotional hygiene." His focus is developmental, with an emphasis on "innovating" emotions in children and adults through "emotion performance utilization." Fascinating.... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.--CHOICE Exalted by his clarity of understanding human emotions, Dr. Ninivaggi's Making Sense of Emotion: Innovating Emotional Intelligence succeeds in presenting a supremely well-crafted model of emotion, neuroscience, and clinical perspectives.--Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory, PhD, University of Haifa In my day to day work, I meet many people who are struggling with emotion. Holding, supporting, allowing, and understanding emotion is at the core of what I do, and it seems to me our society has a pretty big problem with emotions. Here is a book seeking to correct this emotional illiteracy by offering an alternative to the common view of ourselves as a mind separated from the body. Dr. Ninivaggi's "biomental" self is one where biology is inseparable from mind. A place where emotion takes centre stage holding the whole show together. Dr. Ninivaggi takes Emotional Intelligence, adds some welcome new twists, and offers up a framework for how we might exploit his insights. This is a book to take time digesting because it is much more than just a description of an emotional "theory." Also on "offer" is a guided tour of the traps posed by the "Rat Race" and the more enigm