If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far"
- Daniel Goleman
Although the term "The communication of Emotional
Meaning" was first brought to the attention by a member of the Department
of Psychology Teachers at College Columbia University Joel Rober Davitzs in
1964, it gained popularity in the 1995
book "Emotional Intelligence", written by author and science
journalist Daniel Goleman. Since this time, EI, and Goleman's 1995 analysis,
have been criticized within the scientific community, despite creative reports
of its usefulness in the popular press.
Daniel Goleman's brilliant report from the frontiers
of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our "two
minds", the rational and the emotional, and how they together shape our
destiny. He recommended highlevels of emotional intelligence progress working
connections, offer assistance to create issue understandable skills, increment
effectiveness, and sufficiency. Instead of affecting exam scores or report
composing, he focuses on sustaining how E.I controls feelings and agreement
with connections. Goleman characterizes it as “the capacity to recognize,
evaluate, and control one’s possess feelings, the emotion of others which of
groups.”
Through true to life examples, Goleman declares the
five crucial skills of emotional intelligence (self-awareness, self-regulation,
internal motivation, empathy, and social skills) and shows how they determine
our success in relationships, work, and even our physical well-being. What
emerges is an entirely new way to talk about being smart.
Also, studies have shown that people with high E.I
have greater mental health, job performance, and leadership skills. Although no
causal relationships have been shown and such findings are likely to attribute
to general intelligence and specific personality traits rather than emotional
intelligence as a construct. For example, Goleman indicated that E.I accounted
for 67% of the abilities considered necessary for superior performance in
leaders, and contributed twice as much as the IQ. Other research finds that the
effect of E.I pronounces on leadership and regulatory performance is
non-significant when ability and personality are controlled for, and that
general intelligence correlates very closely with leadership.
Specific ability models address the ways in which
emotions facilitate thought and understanding. For example, emotions may
interact with thinking and allow people to be better decision-makers. Following
their research, their initial definition of E.I was revised to "The
ability to perceive emotion, integrate emotion to facilitate thought,
understand emotions, and to regulate emotions to promote personal growth."
However, after pursuing further research, their definition of E.I evolved into
"the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions, to enhance
thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access
and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and
emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote
emotional and intellectual growth." The model proposes that individuals
vary in their ability to process information of an emotional nature and in
their ability to relate emotional processing to a wider area.
The model claims
that E.I includes four types of abilities:
1) Perceiving emotions: the ability to detect and decipher emotions in
faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts. Including the ability to
identify one's own emotions. Perceiving emotions represents a basic aspect of
emotional intelligence, as it makes all other processing of emotional
information possible.
2) Using emotions: the ability to harness emotions to facilitate various
cognitive activities, such as thinking and problem-solving. The emotionally
intelligent person can capitalize fully upon their changing moods in order to
best fit the task at hand.
3) Understanding emotions: the ability to comprehend emotional
language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. For
example, understanding emotions embrace the ability to be sensitive to slight
variations between emotions, and the ability to recognize and describe how
emotions evolve over time.
4) Managing emotions: the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and
in others. Therefore, the emotionally intelligent person can harness emotions,
even negative ones, and manage them to achieve intended goals.
The ability E.I model has been criticized in the research for lacking face and validity in the workplace. However, in terms of construct validity, ability E.I tests have a great advantage over self-report scales of E.I because they compare individual maximal performance to standard performance scales and do not rely on individuals' support of descriptive statements about themselves. :)
By Valentina Quintero, Step 8 Yellow
