Emotional Styles
I had been looking for a way to supplement my basic batterer intervention curriculum (anger and stress management, communication and conflict-resolution training, CBT exercises) with information that would help my clients to improve their overall functioning long after they have finished the program, and in particular their ability to properly regulate emotions and maintain healthy relationships. In this respect, I have found the book by Richard Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain (Penguin Books, 2013), to be immensely useful. How we go about getting our needs met is described from a neuroscientist’s perspective, based in studies of how behavior is related to specific brain functioning. Compared to other theories on personality, his concept of Emotional Styles is easier to understand and more suited to the work we do with partner-abusive clients. The table below is central to the materials I have put together, based on Davidson’s research, for my programs here in the San Francisco Bay Area, United States. We go over this table in group, after each clients has completed the Emotional Styles questionnaire. Afterwards, we discuss how our program’s standard material, as well as suggestions by Davidson, can help improve their functioning in the various categories.
The Six Dimensions of Emotional Style
|
Dimension |
Description, Brain Basis, and Impact on Emotion Regulation/Relationships |
| Resilience | How slowly or quickly you recover from adversity. Marked by greater left activation in the Prefrontal Cortex (a center of intention and self-control), and by inhibitory signals to the Amygdala (a center of flight-or-fight responses). Low resilience is associated with depression, intense emotions (such as anger), and impulsive behaviors. Individuals low in resilience get discouraged easily, or obsess over minor failures, and give up on long-term goals. |
| Outlook | How long you are able to sustain positive emotion. Individuals with a positive outlook have high neuronal activity in the Ventral Striatum, where neurons release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in motivation, desire and positive emotion, as well as endogenous opiates (“runner’s high”). Activity in this part of the brain is increased by signals from the Prefrontal Cortex. Individuals with a negative outlook are more likely to be depressed, avoid social relationships, and to be unmotivated to pursue goals. |
| Social Intuition | How adept you are at reading faces and body language and picking up social signals from people around you. High social intuition is associated with high activity in the Fusiform Gyrus, and low levels of activity in the Amygdala. Low social intuition can lead to isolation, poor interpersonal communication, anger, increased conflict and aggression, and depression. |
| Self-Awareness | How well you perceive bodily feelings that reflect emotions (in addition to beliefs, values, motives, etc.). High self-awareness is characterized in the brain by high levels of activity in the Insula, which is connected to the “visceral” organs – e.g., heart, lungs, stomach, sexual organs. Low self-awareness is associated with difficulties in accurately gauging levels of stress, such as increased heart rate, as well as identifying emotions. People who have poor self-awareness are less likely than others to take care of themselves. They are more at risk for depression, feeling overwhelmed by their emotions and engaging in impulsive or aggressive behavior. |
| Sensitivity to Context | How good you are at regulating your emotional responses to take into account the context you find yourself in. Excellence at determining context is associated with high levels of neuronal activity in the Hippocampus, a part of the brain that is also associated with the transfer of short-term memories into long-term storage. Individuals who have poor sensitivity to context have experienced some sort of trauma in the past (e.g., have grown up in an abusive or highly dysfunctional home, experienced serious assaults or accidents). They tend to react to mild or moderate stress or provocation as though they were being re-traumatized. In intimate relationships, this would include reacting to being yelled at by punching the other person, or interpreting a partner’s request for space as an indication of betrayal or abandonment. |
| Attention | How sharp and clear your focus is, as determined by patterns of neuronal activity in the prefrontal cortex. Individuals who are high on the attention dimension are able to detect a high degree of detail in the environment without being overwhelmed, but can also focus their attention on something specific if they need to without shutting out everything else entirely. Individuals who are at the low end, who tend to be unfocused, can miss important social cues, or hyper-focus too much, causing miscommunication and relationship conflict. |
Feb 08, 2015 @ 21:13:02
Thank you for posting this John. These are things I like to cover in addition to what the State of Washington requires of DV perpetrator treatment providers. I exchange the term “conflict resolution” with “conflict management” though. It’s just my opinion that not everything is resolvable and should be so stated to the clients. With respect…
Nov 10, 2024 @ 11:31:16
In the UK the Cafcass pathway to accredited DV (now DA ) programmes was decommissioned in June 2022. Those programmes were very largely feminist inspired and manily based on Duluth. They failed to engage with the men and the accreditor failed to recognise female abusers. One of the first things required for work with domestic abusers in our opinions and experience of 30 years of working in this agenda, face-to-face, in intensive therapeutically informed ways is an understanding of my “own emotional position” (and the emotional position of others) my knowledge and understanding about how I respond in my emotional states (and what brings those states about) and how to regulate those states. I notice the CBT remark in previous comments. Joseph Ledoux’s research of 1996 posited, highly over-simplified, the “high road and the low road” and in that, emotion colours and determins our thoughts and thus our actions. (We suggest that Bowlby’s “attachment theory” with which we would associate the emotion TRUST, provides a simple but very useful way of introducing “emotional regulation”, which we believe, in intimate couple relationships, needs to take precedence over “cognitions”. (although we recognise that thoughts can also “raise” emotions.) As to the 8, primary, categorical, declarative emotions, we divised our own “basic” wheel in 1996 and about 10 years later discovered Plutchnik’s wheel, much more elegant model. Working to this model engages the curiosity of the client and therefore their willingness to learn and complete work, in contrast to the prolonged now decommissioned feminist inspired Duluth stuff which promoted drop-outs and resentments.
Nov 19, 2024 @ 10:08:29
Via an FNF (Families Need Fathers, soon to be rebranded Both Parents Matter ) AGM, an American guy talked about his mainly online programme which sounded to have many similarities to ours – but with some additions which we are going to add. His programme is mainly via Zoom – ours is entirely face-to-face – which we think is essential – but, of course California, where he is based, has a population density of about 250 per square mile whereas UK is about 470 – Scotland 70 and Wales 150. So distances in America between centres of population are much, much greater than UK making travel to a centre much more of a hurdle – so his early work makes sense in his context. He also acknowledged that clients, whom they feel have not made enough progress in the Zoom sessions, are invited to face-to-face meetings. We already offer ongoing post-course support via Zoom – we are also going to add a 3 session Zoom “mentoring” sequence, learning from him.
This kind of work started off as “anger management”. Lisa Feldman-Barrett has pointed out the “emotional” stereotypes asscoiated with men – anger – and the emotional stereotype associated with women ” anxiety”. The course we completed this weekend included two individuals with pronounced “disgust” markers ( and within our model we see disgust as the extreme variation of distrust). In the one client we were able to see the “Disgust” for his mother , visible in the “snear” delivered by his wrinkled nose and “feed that back to him” immediacy-wise, so that he can now begin to recognise and understand his “disgust”. It became clear that the other guy’s heightened feelings of “disgust” motivated his “intentional behaviours” (as opposed to his reactive behaviours) towards his ex-wife. Within this group we were, on this occasion, not able to find a “visceral component” to help him to manage / regulate / his feelings of disgust. Following supervision today we shall be attempting to do that in a couple of additional online sessions.
Cordis Bright produced research on a project here in UK. “Key barriers to perpetrators’ engagement included:
• Social workers lacking in awareness of My Time.
• The length of the referral and assessment process.
• The accessibility of the assessment and the session themselves.
• The format of the programme, including the length and the group delivery
model.”
I have the full paper available and could quietly share with anyone who wished.
Mar 27, 2025 @ 07:23:55
The late Ellen Pence (famous – or infamous – for the Pence wheel) honestly and courageously recognised in the book she edited and contributed to in 1996, (Duluth and Beyond, lessons from…p.28/9) that she and her colleagues rarely found a desire by the male perpetrators she worked with to have “power and control” over a female partner – although she persistently told the men in groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial – until that time that they realised that they were simply establishing what they had originally sought to find.
So when the original “underlying theory” collapses, or is recognised by its originator as very laregly wrong, where do you look for a new underpinning theory? For underpinning, I’m going to suggest you look no further than Drs John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and their other collaborators and “attachment theory.” Let’s move on now to “anger management”. There have been lots of developments in the understanding of basic, primary, categorical emotions. More recently the neuroscientists have got hold of the topic and along with other professions have begun pulling the threads of the earlier ideas apart. Drs LeDoux, Siegel, Schore, Plutchik, Porges, Feldman-Barrett and many, many others have all contributed very significantly, following on from the decade of the brain. Much more recently, thanks to a client’s suggestion, I’ve come across the following up of hormonal developments in the fetus, in girls, in boys, in adolescents and in adults, young and old. Fascinating reading for me, as Dr Louann Brisendine takes us through the hormonal developments in The Female Brain and The Male Brain, with hints about what maybe happens in those brains which do not develop according to the more usual sex markers, when the brain is not “marinated” in testosterone, in the case of male fetuses or supported by the mother’s estrogen in the case of female fetuses. Of particular interest to the mainly ( but not exclusively) men involved in our work the Daddy Brain”, a chapter in the Male Brain, resonates with several.
Mar 27, 2025 @ 07:49:46
Thank you David for sharing this very interesting information! I just finished a training on Monday for facilitators on Attachment Issues in BIPs. I think it’s very important to consider Attachment and for facilitators to consider creating a “secure base” for clients to help them move from insecure to secure. Dr. Diane Heller and The Attachment Project have some very good material to consider in this area. I also taught on class on Tuesday regarding Stalking Issues in BIPs and of course research shows Attachment issues showing up in the population engaged in stalking behaviors! I also created a lesson in each of those subjects to augment my current curriculum as I think it is important to help educate our clients as well. Many years ago 20/20 did a story on the Male and Female brain and interviewed Dr. Louann Brisendine. I use this in a class discussing Gender Roles. Very interesting material! Thanks for sharing your insights as well.
Mar 27, 2025 @ 17:57:31
I am quite familiar with that Ellen quote. That was a very brave thing to do, especially back in the 90s when most of the DV treatment community was still under the spell of the gender/feminist paradigm.