How Emotions Shape Our World. (3)

Anthropology offers insights from our ancient past

What's the most effective way to communicate with someone feeling lost, hopeless, and afraid? Reason with them logically, or acknowledge their emotions?

Of all places, there's an answer to that question in an article called, How to Solve Toddler Tantrums: Think Like a Neanderthal by anthropologist Meredith Small. The parallel observations she makes regarding human adults in an article about, of all things, two-year-olds, were more useful and profound than much of what's written on social marketing or public health.

Small cites the theories of pediatrician Harvey Karp, who suggests toddlers are driven by instinct and emotion more so than reason. Specifically, seeing toddlers under the lens of human development, children are like our distant ancestors, the Neanderthals.

Karp suggests speaking in succinct phrases that acknowledge the toddler’s feelings ("You are angry") rather than in analytical, Homo Sapiens terms (“Axel, Fuddruckers simply isn't the place for civilized people to carry on in this way") avoids infuriating them further. They only want to know they are heard, and that their emotions are valid.

Neanderthals were no dummies. Their brains were bigger than Homo Sapiens' and most likely capable of sophisticated logic, but history worked against them. They had not yet developed the tools of language.

[Karp's] advice is better couched in the notion that Homo sapiens, and presumably our ancestors, were designed to feel very deeply, and little kids simply want their emotions acknowledged, just like adults. In fact, adults spend millions of dollars each year to talk to counselors and get their feelings heard.

I was immediately struck, upon reading that, by how frequently health care messages are posed to patients and consumers in a Homo Sapiens kind of way. Because health care is treated as a “technical” subject — involving the application of tools to fix symptoms in the machine of the human body — messages hinge around technical imagery couched in slightly pedantic, analytical language, which Karp suggests infuriates the Neanderthal brain.

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