Emotional Intelligence

What Is Emotional Intelligence? Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It is generally said to include 3 skills: 1. Emotional awareness, including the ability to identify your own emotions and those of others; 2. The ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problems solving; 3. The ability to manage emotions, including the ability to regulate your own emotions, and the ability to cheer up or calm down another person. Does Emotional Intelligence Exist? To test whether EI exists, Peter Salovey, David Caruso, and John D. Mayer developed a number of ability measures of EI. Dr. Caruso had trained in intelligence research and had joined their group in 1995. Their team wanted to see if we could measure emotional intelligence abilities, if they improved with age (a characteristic of intelligence generally), and if EI abilities together formed a cohesive intelligence. If all of those conditions were met, EI arguably would be an intelligence. One sort of test question they developed asked test-takers to identify the emotions expressed in a photograph of a face: for example, to know that sadness might be indicated by a frown. Another kind of question asked people how emotional reactions unfold. For example: George was sad, and an hour later, he felt guilty. What happened in-between? (Choose one): A. George accompanied a neighbor to a medical appointment to help out the neighbor. B. George lacked the energy to call his mother, and missed calling her on her birthday. High EI test-takers recognize that alternative B, the missed birthday phone call, would better account for George's change in mood from sadness to guilt. The ability to answer such questions correctly seems to improve as children grow older. In addition, such questions cohere as a group: People who do well at some items tend to do well on others as well. For these reasons and others, EI is now believed to exist and is considered by many to be an established intelligence. What Emotional Intelligence Is Not Emotional intelligence is often claimed to be many things it is not: journalistic accounts of EI often have equated it to other personality traits. Emotional intelligence, however, is not agreeableness. It is not optimism. It is not happiness. It is not calmness. It is not motivation. Such qualities, although important, have little to do with intelligence, little to do with emotions, and nearly nothing to do with actual emotional intelligence. It is especially unfortunate that even some trained psychologists have confused emotional intelligence with such personal qualities. Groups of widely studied personality traits, including motives such as the need for achievement, self-related concepts such as self-control, emotional traits such as happiness, and social styles such as assertiveness should be called what they are, rather than being mixed together in haphazard-seeming assortments and named emotional intelligence . Is EI a Better Predictor of Success than IQ? EI plays a huge role in detemining how we lead our lives and how successful we are. It expands our notions of intelligence, it helps us predict important life outcomes, and it can be used to help people find the right work and relationships for themselves