An essential task of school leadership is helping bring students and faculty into the state that will facilitate their working at their best. Positive emotional states help a brain learn efficiently, whereas excess stress and negative emotions shrink the brain's capacity to learn. Goleman describes new findings in neuroscience that reveal how people respond to one anothers' emotional states as they interact. The neural mechanisms for this automatic attunement are called "mirror neurons." The emotional state of the most powerful person in any organization has a ripple effect on the emotions of everyone else. School leaders, therefore, have a significant effect on the social-emotional climate of the school as a whole, and have a responsibility to develop a socially intelligent leadership style that will engender a culture conducive to peak learning. Goleman delineates positive and negative leadership styles--in terms of social intelligence--and cites research showing that students achieve at higher levels in schools in which leaders adopt the positive styles.