3 - 1 - module 5.1 studies and neurological evidence of coaching to the pea

8/22/2019 3 - 1 - Module 5.1 Studies and Neurological Evidence of Coaching to the PEA

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[MUSIC].Welcome back.In the last modules, we've talked abouthow coaching with compassion can invokethe positive emotional attractor, thePEA.What I'm going to do in this module istalk about some of the studies in whichwe've shown, why, invoking the PEA morethan the NEA really helps.Besides the work as I said, of BarbaraFredrickson and Marcial Losada and EmilyHeaphy and John Gottman and theircolleagues.In the research thatpeople have beendoing here at the Case Western Reserve.We've got a number of very excitingdiscoveries.Masud Khawaja, in his PhD thesis,who is

also an MD, studied the degree oftreatment adherence for type 2 diabetics.Now, around the world, treatmentadherence, having people taketheirmedicine and watch their diet for type 2diabetics is a miserable 50%.It's horrible, because it leads to a lotmore complications,what are calledcomorbidities, and then in fact, peoplealso increase the cost of health care.And people lose mobility and we lose our

loved ones.Medical literature has done a lot to tryto figure out what is it that increasesthe likelihood of treatment adherents?What we know is it's nottelling peoplehorror stories.Because when you tell them horrorstories, they still don't kind of do whatthey need to do.This, again,is the difference between

what happens if you appeal to the NEA andpeople close down, become defensive,versus appeal to the PEA.Well, what Massoud found was that anumber of the things in thedoctor-patient relationship, as themedical literature predicts, do affect

treatment adherence.


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But they are fully mediated through thepatient's experience of the degree of thepositive emotional attractorto negativeemotional attractor in his or herrelationship to the physician.And in fact, using a measure that we'veused in a number of thesestudies,they're actually picking up, or Basudpicked up the degree to which the patientexperienced a perception of sharedvision,of shared compassion, of sharedpositive mood, in the relationship to thedoctor.What that means statistically is if youwere going to work on onething toimprove treatment adherence.You'd work on the experience the patienthas in their relationship to thephysician.

Again, we see this in a lot of othersituations, in leadership situations forexample, the power of shared vision.

Byron Clayton found that his doctoratedissertation was one of the strongestpredictors of successful mergers inacquisitions.

And very often people misguidedly thinkit has to do with financialmanipulations.And we know how costly the 80% of mergers

and acquisitionsthat don't work aretoward organizations and communities.John Neff showed that one of thepredictors of multi-year financialsuccess infamily businesses was one ofthe 5 key predictors, was the degree ofshared vision about the family business.[UNKNOWN] in his dissertation,showedthat in technical teams that the degreeof shared vision accentuated the

emotional intelligence in the teamstowards getting moreorganizationalengagement.So with this Panoply of research resultsand this increasing excitement that wecan start to see these effectswe decidedto look inside the neurology.two more studies.


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Linda Pittinger showed in herdissertation recently that for ITmanagers and ITprofessionals the degreeof shared vision and shared positivemood, accentuated, mediated, and causedtheir increased effectiveness andengagementin their work.Joann Quinn showed with physicianleaders, their leadership effectivenesswas predicted by their socialintelligence.

But again it was mediated by the qualityof the relationships, in particular, thedegree to which they experienced in theirrelationships withthe people at work ashared vision, a shared compassion, and ashared positive mood.So to test this, we decided to go insidethe brain.

And we designed one FMRI study that wedid several years ago, in which webrought in sophomores at Case WesternReserve University for oneof twocoaching sessions, advising sessions.One was PEA focused, and one was NEAfocused.

We decided on the PEA focus, where you'dbring the sophomore in, and the advanced

doctoral student, usually some 15 to 20years older than theundergraduates whohave not taught them in any other coursewould ask really 1 question.Which is if your life were great 10 yearsafter yougraduated from Case WesternReserve University, what would it belike?And they would talk for 30 minutes.

The NEA condition wasn't all that

negative.It actually was very typical of what mostparents and faculty members ask.Basically, there werefour questions.How are you doing in your courses?Are you doing all the readings?Are you doing all the assignments?Are you getting enough timefrom your


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instructor?You notice these aren't really negative,but they all have this thing of inducingsome degree of guilt.

Well, [COUGH] and by the way people wererandomly assigned to either Massoud Koajaor Angela Passarelli doing these coachingsessions.

Randomly.And they randomly sequenced whether thatthey had the PEA session or the NEAsession first.And then, a few days later,they cameinto the FMRI lab.And by the way, this is now documented inseries of articles.One we gave it the academy management in2010,and one that's under review rightnow in a neuroscience journal.And this is under the leadership of

professor Tony Jack in the biomedicallab,and the person actually running FMIfor this study was Regena Likey.In the process what we discovered, threeto five days later as they wentthrough,in the FMRI scan.And they're pushing buttons reacting tovideo statements by the two people whointerviewed them and was,were coachingand advising them.

They reacted to how they felt about them.And one of the things that we did was wehad PEA type statements,like, my lifewill be fantastic because of my time hereat Case.Or we had NEA statements, Things arereally boring here at Case.Or we had neutralones, I'm learning atCase.We figured if it a university learning, astatement about learning is fairly

neutral.And after we analyze allthe data, wefound a number of dramatic, statisticallysignificant findings.As you'll see in the visual, one of thethings that was significantly

distinguishing the NEA activation.Was activation of the interior singular


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cortex, and this is a part of theexecutive function, in particularthetask positive network, which is activatedwhen you feel torn and feel torn, andfeel a degree of guilt.We've also activated the medialprefrontal cortex, which is a place wherevery often it's associated with feelingmore self-concious.In contrast, the positive emotionalattractorwas predictive of activation ofthe orbital frontal cortex.A key part of the limbic system and thenucleus accumbens, kind of apleasure-rewardcenter in the brain.And the posterior singular cortex, a keypart of the default mode and socialnetwork.We were so moved by the significanceof

these results, and in presentations atdifferent neuroscience and managementconferences, got so much encouragement.Last year, we did another study which weare, although still analyzing and we'reat the point we're writing up the papersto submit toacademic journals.What we did this time, was we decided totest, the degree to which when we createda control condition.

And then we created a condition wherepeople would write their visionstatement, but not necessarily talk tosomeone about it.

'Cuz we were wondering, we, Tony,Professor Tony Jack and I began tosuspect that it was in the talking tosomeone that the realneural activationof openness, of the PEA was happening.And then we had a do, what we call a dosedependent part of the experiment.

We had people going through 130 minutePEA session, people going through 230minute PEA sessions, and people goingthree.And again, on this study,Professor TonyJack was leading the lab.Angela Passarelli was one of the twocoaches interviewers, and Hector Martinez


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was the other one.

And Abby Dawson was actually running thethe FMRIs and the scans and helping uswith all the informed consent.In this case we tried to get studentswhowere a little bit older, juniors,sometimes senior, at Case WesternReserve.So they're still undergraduates, 20, 21year olds.

And again they came in, and we did thesame type of NEA session, I describedearlier.for some people we had them write thevision for an hour,and then the PEAsession.One of the sessions, was similar, talkingabout a person's personal vision, as Imentioned earlier.

The second one asked people to get intocompassion or gratitude.In terms of who helped them the most, andthe third asked them to get into

mindfulness around core values andvirtues.And what we're finding again is veryexciting.First, if we put people into the PEAconditions,we're saying, seeing the same

statistically significant random effectsactivations that we saw before.An they're even clearer, because now,wehad two an a half times what is normal inthese FMRI studies, we had 54 subjects.Secondly, we're seeing that dosedependency really works.

That the more, a person has, the more thePEA sessions they have.The stronger an clearer the activation

is, in the ventral medial prefrontalcortex, a key part of activating, theparasympathetic nervous system.What came out in both of them is theactivation of a part of the visualcortex,not involved in just seeingsomething, but the part of the visualcortex involved with imagining something.


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And right now, it looks like thatmerelywriting the vision statement helps, andactivates some things.But doesn't activate the set of regionsof the brain that are associatedwithbeing more open to new possibilities.So all of this is starting to help us tounderstand the detailed neural mechanismsof why coaching,advising, talking withsomeone to the positive emotionalattractor can be such a liftingexperience.And in the coming modules in this class,we're going to prepare you to experimentwith that.To try that, to see if you can have whatwe call conversations that inspire.

You know, by the way, one thing I shouldbe careful about.

We had people from many differentcultures and countries.As subjects and as the coach'sinterviewers, that you might guess fromtheir names, involved in the study.We found no differences in activation ofwhether the interviewer or the advisorwas male or female.And we found no differences between

whether or not the subject, the students,

were male or female.So we weren't finding any genderdifferences with regard to this issue of

invoking the positive emotionalattractor.[SOUND]

3 - 1 - module 5.1 studies and neurological evidence of coaching to the pea

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