Effectiveness... Being Genuine

[Think_n_See]

Cool research by Nass et al. in 2005
"Improving automotive safety by pairing driver emotion and car voice
emotion"

Turns out that if before driving, people are put into a happy or sad
state (by watching five-minute happy or sad videos), then they perform
better in driving simulations if they have a car-voice that matches
their emotional state of happy or sad. I.e., there are fewer virtual
accidents, people are more attentive to the road. What is fascinating
is that a possible conclusion of this paper seems to be (and this is
from a friend's description of the full paper not available online, and
from my read of the abstract)... the possible conclusion is that it
takes so much human brain and emotional resources to deal with
cross-wired emotions (a situation in which the person's mood is happy
and the car voice is sad, or vice versa) that dealing with this
mismatched emotion actually affects the driver's performance.

I find this incredibly fascinating for two reasons:
1) That the brain and emotional resource required to deal with
mismatched emotions are so high that a purely logical function (such as
avoiding car accidents in driving simulations!) gets affected and acts
inefficiently.
2) To me, this research says that people need to be genuine with their
emotions. If you're down for example, you need to, as my friend M
says, "really feel what you feel," and perhaps not necessarily, as in
the movie Strictly Ballroom "put on a happy face." And on the other
hand, if you're up, you don't necessarily need to seek out bad news or
something to equilibrate you because that might simply make you
mismatched again. Or, most specifically, when you switch from happy to
sad or sad to happy, do it because it's a genuine change.


The abstract and details are here:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1057070

[da5zeay]

That's really interesting...it reminds me of something that I think of
as "emotional clutching" (as in an autombile manual transmission) in my
past experiences in management. I used to wonder why I was so tired all
the time when I didn't seem to be doing very much actual production
work. Anyway, I realized that a lot of what I was doing was "matching
revs" between upper management, programmers, myself, and other artists
so people could keep moving. At the time I didn't think this was really
a real job, as I was coming from a place where work == making things. I
see it as a real job now, the art of building teams and team
communication, though ironically I'm not really in a place where I do
that anymore.

In the aforementioned management experience, I found that to be able to
match revs effectively, I really needed to have some facet of the work
or of my own values that I really believed in. I think this corresponds
to the genuineness idea! Ultimately I left that company because the
moral values ultimately didn't match, and I was heavily burned out from
all the constant emotional shifting I had to do to promote the favored
work production style and not having the ability to change it that
easily. So in a way, my genuine self was very fractured, and I spent a
lot of time piecing it back together afterwards.

Just for the sake of argument, I'm wondering how universal "being
genuine == effectiveness" is. I think this presupposes that being in
tune with one's emotions and acting on that is the way to do it, but
clearly one can be effective without being this way. If you're an
emotional person, there would be a high cost. But if you're NOT that
way, or you've trained yourself, or you don't care, then you can still
effectively power on through difficult scenarios. It would be
interesting to look at the individuals involved in the study, rather
than the overall statistical conclusion, to see whether this view is
also supported.

But I think the overall thing I get out of this is: happiness is being
in tune with yourself, and not being in a "bad place" because of that.

[Think_n_See]

Q for you: what do you mean by "there would be a high cost?"

> I think this presupposes that being in
> tune with one's emotions and acting on that is
> the way to do it, but clearly one can be effective
> without being this way. If you're an
> emotional person, there would be a high cost.
> But if you're NOT that way, or you've trained yourself,
> or you don't care, then you can still
> effectively power on through difficult scenarios.

For the second person - the one who's not emotional,
for that person being genuine would be to not have those
emotions, I'd assume.

I don't know if people are effective if they never listen to
their emotions. I have no reason to believe that.
It might be true, but I have no idea.

Here's a situation:
You're in the office - someone asks you a question
that you're uncomfortable answering. Do you...
1) blow off the question by making some joke or
changing the topic?
2) insist that that is an inappropriate question?
3) answer with a white lie, like "I don't know"
if you actually do know?
4) say, "I don't want to answer that question" or
"that's my business" or "that's personal."

I say that 4 is very direct. I'm saying that if you
recognize the emotion of being on-guard or not wanting
to answer, then it's cool to act on that (in a tactful way)
and just get across the message that "no, that's where
the boundary lies."

[da5zeay]

I might be thinking of cases where people follow 'the ends justify the
means'. I'm not suggesting this is something "good". Maybe I'm just
wondering what "effectiveness" means in this case!