Empathy consists of at least three related skills. First, there is the skill of mirroring. This is the act of accurately catching the emotion of the person in front of you.

The second empathy skill is not mirroring but mentalizing. Most primates can mirror another primate’s emotions at least to some degree.

Mentalizing also helps us simultaneously sympathize with a person while also detaching to make judgments about them.

Brackett has taken his technique to schools and run people through his RULER

curriculum, in when he teaches people a set of emotional skills: how to Recognize,

Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate their emotions. Brackett’s technique is a very powerful way to improve the emotional awareness and emotional regulation of both children and adults. Recently, for example, Brackett and his team developed ways to measure the emotional intelligence of supervisors at various workplaces. They found that employees whose supervisors score low on emotional intelligence say they feel inspired about 25 percent of the time, whereas employees whose supervisors score high on emotional intelligence feel inspired about 75 percent of the time. In other words, people who are good at recognizing and expressing emotions have a huge effect on those around them.

Over time, a person who enjoys a higher vagal tone will begin to see and construct the world differently. I mean this literally, too. As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” People who are scared take in a scene differently. Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech. Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.