Author
Marc Brackett
The Yale emotion scientist who treats feelings as information and emotional skill as something every child and adult can learn.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Marc Brackett is a research psychologist and the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, established in 2013, and a professor at the Yale Child Study Center. His academic path ran alongside Peter Salovey, one of the originators of the scientific theory of emotional intelligence, and his own research has focused on how the ability to understand and manage emotions shapes learning, relationships, decision-making and well-being.
His interest in the subject is personal. As he recounts in his book, he endured bullying and abuse as a child and kept much of it to himself. One adult changed that: his uncle Marvin, a teacher, who asked him how he was feeling and actually waited for the answer. Brackett has described that question, asked with real curiosity, as the seed of his life's work.
With colleagues, Brackett developed RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning built around five skills: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing and Regulating emotions. RULER has been adopted by schools across the United States and in other countries, and it brought practical tools such as the Mood Meter into classrooms and staff rooms.
In 2019 he published Permission to Feel, which carries the findings of his research and the RULER framework beyond schools to parents, managers and anyone who wants a more precise relationship with their own emotional life.
The signature
Brackett's central move is to turn the emotion judge into an emotion scientist. The judge labels feelings as good or bad, right or wrong, and tries to shut them down. The scientist approaches them with curiosity: what am I feeling, what caused it, what is it telling me, and what do I want to do with it? Emotions in this view are not noise to be suppressed but data about our needs, our values and our situation.
His method is notably granular and teachable. Rather than settling for "fine" or "stressed," he asks people to locate their state on the Mood Meter by two dimensions, pleasantness and energy, and then find the most precise word for it, because a feeling that is accurately named can be understood and regulated. The skills are framed as skills, not traits, so they can be practised by children and adults alike, and he insists that the adults in a child's life must build them first.