Word: skillful
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...absorbed in reverie in front of a red curtain, his gaze slightly raised like a Guido Reni saint as he toys with a gold chain. The other end of the chain is attached to a tame flying squirrel nibbling a nut. Everything in the painting is a show of skill in illusion: the squirrel's pelt, the reflections and the thread of white highlight on the mahogany tabletop, the glass of water (to show how well he could do transparency), the boy's fresh, young skin...
Sexual anxiety in "Hour" has more to do with delusional love than anxiety. It's not just his wife Johan fears, it is high society itself--quick to leech off him for his artistic skill but just as eager to jeer at him as a spurned suitor or a freak...
...want to take an average of your emotional skill," argues Harvard psychology professor Jerome Kagan, a pioneer in child-development research. "That's what's wrong with the concept of intelligence for mental skills too. Some people handle anger well but can't handle fear. Some people can't take joy. So each emotion has to be viewed differently...
Metamood is a difficult skill because emotions so often appear in disguise. A person in mourning may know he is sad, but he may not recognize that he is also angry at the person for dying--because this seems somehow inappropriate. A parent who yells at the child who ran into the street is expressing anger at disobedience, but the degree of anger may owe more to the fear the parent feels at what could have happened...
Empathy too can be seen as a survival skill. Bert Cohler, a University of Chicago psychologist, and Fran Stott, dean of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development in Chicago, have found that children from psychically damaged families frequently become hypervigilant, developing an intense attunement to their parents' moods. One child they studied, Nicholas, had a horrible habit of approaching other kids in his nursery-school class as if he were going to kiss them, then would bite them instead. The scientists went back to study videos of Nicholas at 20 months interacting with his psychotic mother...