Bending Without Breaking: The Power of Social Emotional Flexibility

Bending Without Breaking: The Power of Social and Emotional Flexibility

What is Social and Emotional Flexibility?

Social and emotional flexibility, at its core, is the ability to:

• Manage emotional responses: It involves recognizing, understanding, and regulating our emotions in response to varying situations and interactions.
• Tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity: Embracing change and adapting to unexpected circumstances without becoming overwhelmed.
• Shift perspectives: Being able to see things from another person’s point of view, empathize, and consider alternative solutions.
• Adapt to changing social dynamics: This includes understanding and responding appropriately to diverse social cues, adjusting communication styles, and navigating different social roles.

This flexibility allows us to move fluidly through life’s inevitable changes and challenges, building stronger connections and fostering personal resilience. The benefits of social and emotional flexibility are far-reaching and have been proven to be more important than academic/intellectual skills.

The Neuroscience of Flexible Emotional Thinking 

Flexible emotional thinking, or the ability to adapt and regulate emotional responses depending on the situation, is a complex process orchestrated by a group of brain regions. Neuroscience research has highlighted the critical roles of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala, and hippocampus in this process.

• The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) is crucial for cognitive control and emotion regulation.
  • Areas within the PFC, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), are involved in working memory and executive functions, allowing us to evaluate and modify emotional responses, while integrating emotional information with decision-making and value judgments (Davidson, 2000).  
• The amygdala, a key structure in processing fear and threat, interacts dynamically with the PFC. In flexible emotional thinking, the PFC exerts top-down control over the amygdala, balancing its activity to prevent excessive or inappropriate emotional responses.
  • For instance, studies have shown that increased activity in the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) occurs in conjunction with decreased amygdala reactivity to negative stimuli, improving emotion regulation and generating adaptive responses (Ochsner et al., 2004).   
• The hippocampus, involved in memory and contextual processing, also contributes to flexible emotional thinking. It allows us to recall past experiences and integrate them with current emotional stimuli, providing context for emotional responses.
  • This contextual information is critical for distinguishing between situations that require strong emotional reactions and those that do not. For example, the hippocampus helps differentiate between a genuinely dangerous situation and a situation that merely resembles a past traumatic experience.

Taken together, these findings suggest that children are sensitive to subtle cues exhibited by adults, and use them to guide their thoughts about, and behavior.  Additionally, increased emotional flexibility from improvements in the functioning and interaction of these parts of the brain can be achieved through new learning experiences. However, if those new experiences are adult-led teaching moments or moments encouraging compliance, then the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) is not being used and the amygdala (fight, flight, freeze) takes over.

Greenspan Floortime and Social Emotional Flexibility

From the foundational back-and-forth of early interactions like peekaboo, which encourages adaptable responses from the child, to the sophisticated give-and-take of later verbal negotiations, Greenspan Floortime® fosters social and emotional flexibility through meaningful engagement and dynamic playful interactions.  This approach views flexibility not just as obedience, but as a natural outcome of developing core capacities: adapting to non-verbal social cues, creatively solving problems, generating new ideas, thinking innovatively, and planning proactively. At its heart, Greenspan Floortime® emphasizes asking the question, “Who’s Doing the Thinking?“. By ensuring the child is “doing the thinking”, their own internal cognitive skills are strengthened and specific regions of the brain, like the Prefrontal Cortex, are being Activated and used. This, in turn, cultivates flexible thinking and emotional responses, ultimately leading to social-emotional flexibility that can be generalized across many different social and emotional experiences.

Developing Social and Emotional Flexibility:

Fortunately, this skill isn’t fixed; it can be developed and strengthened through experiences with ‘flexible’ caregivers. Here are some strategies:

• Show Empathy: Actively listen to others, try to understand their perspectives, and practice putting yourself in their shoes. This helps to break down rigid thinking and fosters compassion.
• Challenge ‘Rigid’ Thinking: When you find yourself, and/or your child, stuck in a pattern of negative or inflexible thinking, challenge your assumptions and consider alternative interpretations.
• Embrace Change: Seek out new enjoyable experiences, try different fun activities, and expand your and/or your child’s comfort zone. This helps to build tolerance for uncertainty and adaptability.
• Social Opportunities: Actively engage in social settings that encourage interaction with different types of people. This provides valuable opportunities to practice adapting to various social dynamics.

‘Natural Modeling’ aka Indirect Modeling:

• Making Home a ‘Safe Space’:
  • Children take emotion responsiveness and behavior cues from parents.  
  • Children learn by observing the behaviors of those around them, especially their parents and other caregivers. This is a core principle of social learning theory. By seeing adults handle changes and challenges with flexibility, children learn that it’s possible and desirable.  
  • When adults are flexible, they create a safe environment where children feel comfortable trying new things and adapting to change within their primary supportive and nurturing relationship. This reduces anxiety and promotes a growth mindset.

• Be a good example:
  • If you as a caregiver have a rigid mindset, it will be very hard for your child to develop a flexible one. This is particularly important to remember to apply within interactions directly with your child. 
  • Show children that it’s okay to make mistakes and that plans don’t always go as expected. Be calm and adaptive in the face of change and/or conflict and naturally model how to find alternative solutions.
• Validate Emotions:
  • Acknowledge and validate children’s feelings when they experience frustration or disappointment due to changes even if you disagree with their behavior or cannot meet their need/expectation. This helps them learn to manage their emotions in a healthy way.
• Practice Problem-Solving Together:
  • Involve children in problem-solving situations. Ask for their ideas and encourage them to think creatively and adaptively. DO NOT force your solution on them.

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Citations:

• (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6234014/#:~:text=Taken%20together%2C%20these%20findings%20suggest,their%20thoughts%20about%2C%20and%20behavior)
• https://childmind.org/article/helping-kids-with-flexible-thinking/#:~:text=Modeling%20flexible%20thinking%20for%20your,see%20you%20work%20through%20problems.
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3139552/#:~:text=As%20a%20result%20of%20these,development%2C%20which%20accounted%20for%20the

• Davidson, R. J. (2000). Affective style, psychopathology, and resilience: brain mechanisms and plasticity. American Psychologist, 55(11), 1196.  
• Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. (2004). Rethinking feelings: an fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(7), 1215-1229.  
• Tang, Y. Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213-225.