Are social skills directly linked to emotions?
Many individuals believe that social skills have nothing to do with emotions. How is it possible knowing what to say, how to say it, and the right moment to say it are connected to our feelings? What does detecting signals from the other person have to do with recognizing if I’m sad or happy?
At this point, science provides interesting answers that help us better understand the functioning of our brain.
The anatomy of the prefrontal cortex: What does it have to do with our social and emotional proficiency?
The prefrontal cortex is a crucial component of the human brain, located at the front of the frontal lobe, just behind the forehead. It plays a significant role in influencing your behavior, personality, and planning abilities. It is considered the part that distinguishes us humans from animals the most, as many “human-only” abilities stem from it. It has two big parts which will be the focus of this article:
- Medial PFC (mPFC): This region is engaged in self-reflection, memory, and emotional processing.
- Lateral PFC (lPFC): It is involved in sensory processing, motor control, and performance monitoring.
The Medial PFC (mPFC)
The medial prefrontal cortex is a key region for various cognitive and emotional functions in the brain. Its primary role is to integrate information from different parts of the brain to facilitate decision-making, emotional regulation, and understanding of social relationships.
Implications for social and emotional skills
- Empathy
The Medial PFC (mPFC) is strongly linked to the ability to understand and share the emotions of others. It plays a key role in empathy, allowing us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and comprehend their feelings. - Social decision-making
This brain region is involved in social decision-making processes, such as assessing the reliability of others, judging social situations, and choosing what to do based on social and moral norms. - Self-reflection
The mPFC also contributes to self-reflection, enabling us to evaluate our own actions and mistakes to get better, understand our emotions, and make decisions aligned with our values and personal goals. - Social interaction
It facilitates social interaction by processing social signals and helping calibrate our behavior in different social contexts. It contributes to understanding social norms and adjusting our behavior accordingly.
The Lateral PFC (lPFC)
The lateral prefrontal cortex is involved in a variety of executive cognitive functions, which are higher mental processes that control and regulate thinking and behavior.
Implications for cognitive and executive skills
- Executive Control
The Lateral PFC (lPFC) plays a key role in executive control, which includes skills such as planning, decision-making, logical reasoning, and mental flexibility. These skills are fundamental for tackling complex tasks and problem-solving. - Working Memory
This brain region is implicated in working memory, which is the ability to temporarily hold and manipulate relevant information in the mind while performing a task. - Sustained Attention
It contributes to sustained attention, allowing for the maintenance of focus on a specific task for an extended period. - Cognitive Inhibition
The lPFC plays a role in cognitive inhibition, involving the control of impulses and the filtering of distractions to help sustain attention on the task at hand.
The lPFC is crucial for rational decision-making and solving complex problems. It contributes to evaluating various options, considering long-term consequences, and selecting the best course of action based on goals and objectives.
It is important to highlight that the lPFC and the mPFC work in tandem to achieve balanced brain function. While the mPFC focuses more on emotional and social functions, the lPFC specializes in cognitive and executive aspects.
In a way, we could say that the mPFC is responsible for the “intuition” we have that detects signals given by the other person when interacting with them, while the lPFC takes charge of acting accordingly.
How can we improve our social skills
What we aim to convey with this information is that there are specific brain areas that activate whenever we encounter a social situation. Depending on its complexity and characteristics is what our brain is going to try to achieve with the tools it already has (whether it’s a breakup, meeting new friends, standing up to someone at our workplace, etc.).
And like most brain areas, it can be trained. Just like pianists have the cerebral regions associated with finger dexterity way more developed than the average person, or a mathematician has the areas related to logical thinking and language more developed as well, people who are very good socially tend to have a more developed mPFC. You want to be better at understanding social context, subtle cues, making new friends and building relationships? Training those areas is gonna help that.
How do we stimulate that brain area to further develop? We practice our emotionality.
How can we practice our emotionality
We are going to have to take everything we do during a social encounter and dismantle it into simple bits. One week focused on reading others’ facial expressions, the next week focused on reading others’ body language, the next on our image and what it communicates and so forth. Not only do we have to learn new stuff, we also probably have learned social habits that actually work against us and that we need to relearn from scratch.
Let’s illustrate this with a clearer example: Consider an individual dedicated to martial arts who spends a significant amount of time honing their technique. Initially, they may pay meticulous attention to the movements of their feet and hands, focusing on individual elements.
With practice, they progressively think less about these details, and their actions become more automatic. The same occurs in a combat scenario; they aren’t consciously contemplating each technique but rather moving based on intuition.
But if at any point he learns a technique “wrong” because his master wasn’t specifically trained in that area or because he changed martial arts, he’s gonna have to go through a relearning period where he goes back to the individual elements of that technique and starts building it up again
This analogy extends to our social skills. Our “technique” is our emotional intelligence, enabling us to comprehend the subtleties of social interaction, signals, details, and body language. The more we practice our “technique,” the more intuitive it becomes, enhancing our ability to act effectively in various social situations.
Key guidelines for practicing emotionality
Now that we grasp the significance of emotionality in developing social skills, the crucial question arises: How can we practice and enhance our emotional “technique” to achieve more successful social interactions?
- Emotional self-awareness
Initiating the development of emotional self-awareness is essential. This involves being conscious of what emotions are activated at any given time, understanding how they are affecting us (which sensations, ideas and actions it wants to trigger), and recognizing differences with similar emotional states. Meditation and personal reflection are useful tools for cultivating this aspect. - Active observation
Active observation of others’ emotions is another valuable skill. Practicing empathy by paying attention to facial expressions, tone of voice, and other non-verbal cues helps better understand others’ emotions. Engaging then in conversations about what we’ve seen (“hey, I see you frowning. Did something happen?”) can act as a measure of how accurate our prediction of the other person’s state was. - Gradual exposure to social situations
Similar to how a martial artist perfects their technique through constant practice, we can enhance our social skills by gradually exposing ourselves to different social situations. From informal social events to more formal settings, each interaction is an opportunity to refine our emotional technique. For this to be helpful and not detrimental, the social setting has to demand a bit more than we are comfortable doing. A challenge too high for your skill will only have you fail again and again and frustrate you to the point of not trying anymore. - Constructive feedback
Seeking constructive feedback from close friends or mentors can be invaluable. Understanding how our emotions affect others and receiving suggestions on handling specific social situations significantly contributes to the development of our social skills. - Development of communication skills
Effective communication is an integral part of social skills. Practicing clear expression of emotions, active listening, and adjusting verbal and non-verbal language in different contexts are key aspects (I’d like to do an article on communication eventually). Participating in debate groups or conversation clubs can be opportunities to refine these skills. - Continuous learning
Continuous improvement is fundamental. Assimilating new approaches to social situations, learning from past experiences, and adapting to different contexts are integral parts of the constant practice of our emotional skills. This gets easier as our skill develops.
Conclusion
Just as other brain areas can be developed by practicing different crafts associated with it, we can improve the ones that manage our social skills by training our emotionality. Self-awareness, active observation, gradual exposure, constructive feedback, development of communication skills, and continuous learning are key pillars for cultivating a solid emotional technique and achieving more meaningful and successful social interactions. By practicing consciously and deliberately, we transform our emotionality into an intuitive tool to navigate effectively in the complex world of interpersonal relationships, thus finding an easier time achieving our social objectives.