Not long ago I was interested to read about Marina Semyonova, a great Russian dancer and teacher, who devised a novel way of selecting her students. It was a clever test for mindset. As a former student tells it, “Her students first have to survive a trial period while she watches to see how you react to praise and to correction. Those more responsive to the correction are deemed worthy.”

In other words, she separates the ones who get their thrill from what’s easy - what they’ve already mastered - from those who get their thrill from what’s hard.

And consider this, too: praise, appreciation, expressions of respect – all

develop human thinking. They unwrap confidence and let it saturate talent and will and buds of ability. You know this. Every time someone mentions a quality they admire in you, you do even better at just about everything for a while. And you feel good. And you think better.

And that’s the point. That good-feeling phenomenon is a good-thinking

phenomenon. So says the chemistry at least. Appreciate someone and, as with attention, the hormones in their brain change. Oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine dash around their cortex; and before they know it, they think better and better. We have noticed this repeatedly in all of our work.

So what’s the problem? Why don’t we do it more? It’s not that difficult. We can just notice what is good and say it. That’s it.

In fact, the next time you are with a human being, anywhere at all, notice

something you respect about them, or like about them, or just think is a plus for that moment, and tell them. Even strangers. Their day will change, and when they start to think about something, they’ll be better at it.

Mindfulness has proven very useful for people who tend to act out their feelings rather than experience them internally by encouraging them to reflect rather than react, but therapists like Marsha Linehan, the founder of dialectical behavioral therapy, have discovered that these very people, who seem so “emotional,” actually have very little idea what they are feeling. Linehan, a behaviorist, had the insight that such people are actually phobic toward their own emotions, that when they get an inkling of a disturbing feeling, they go into a kind of panic and, in running away from the experience, express it, or act it out, rather than experience it.

EMOTION SPOTTING. The emotion scholar Marc Brackett has developed a tool to

improve a person’s emotional granularity, something he calls the “mood meter.” It is based on the idea that emotions have two core dimensions, energy and pleasantness. So he constructed a chart with four quadrants. The top right quadrant contains emotions that are high in pleasantness and high-energy: happiness, joy, exhilaration. The bottom right quadrant contains emotions that are high in pleasantness but low-energy: contentment, serenity, ease. The top left contains emotions that are low in pleasantness but high- energy: anger, frustration, fear. The bottom left contains emotions that are low-energy and low in pleasantness: sadness, apathy. The mood meter is a map of human emotions. At any given moment you can pause, figure out where your mood is on the map, and attempt to assign it a label. This exercise, Brackett notes, gives people “permission to feel”— permission to choose not to bottle up their emotions but to acknowledge and investigate them.

Here is where Emmy Werner’s research, our own Harvard Study research, and many other pieces of research from across cultures and populations converge to show that a critical link between childhood experience and positive adult social connections is our ability to process

emotions.

It is from our relationships as children—especially our relationships with our family—that we first learn what to expect from others. This is when we begin to develop the emotional habits, so to speak, that will be with us for the rest of our lives. These habits often define the way we connect to others and our ability to engage others in mutually supportive ways.

A crucial point here is that our ability to process emotions is malleable. In fact, managing emotions is one of the things we actually get better at as we grow old. And there is strong evidence that we don’t have to wait until late in our lives for this to happen. With the right guidance and some practice, we can learn to be better at managing our feelings at any age.