Jennifer Kahn, writing for the New York Times:
Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that while one child may stay rattled by an event for days or weeks, another child may rebound within hours. (Neurotic people tend to recover more slowly.) In theory, at least, social-emotional training can establish neurological pathways that make a child less vulnerable to anxiety and quicker to recover from unhappy experiences. One study found that preschoolers who had even a single year of a social-emotional learning program continued to perform better two years after they left the program; they weren’t as physically aggressive, and they internalized less anxiety and stress than children who hadn’t participated in the program.
In my last few jobs, I’ve found that people vary widely in their abilities to regulate and productively channel emotion.
I wish I could say that those who were better at it enjoyed greater success, but unfortunately that wasn’t my experience — some emotional outbursts are clearly counterproductive, while others do yield results, especially for mediocre leaders.
That said, at this point I won’t work with anyone who can’t manage his or her emotions, so I hope my experience in the future will be different!