Overview of Emotional Intelligence The systematic study of emotional intelligence is often dated to the early 1990s, when scientific articles suggested that there existed an unrecognized but important human mental ability to reason about emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought.
Journalistic accounts of emotional intelligence in books and magazines of the mid-1990s explained the concept to an interested public -- but not without introducing some crucial inaccuracies. Moreover, much has been learned about emotional intelligence since those early writings. So what is emotional intelligence really?
Emotional intelligence represents an ability to validly reason with emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought. A more formal definition is... We define EI as 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.
Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognize the meanings of emotion and their relationships, and to reason and problem-solve on the basis of them. Emotional intelligence is involved in the capacity to perceive emotions, assimilate emotion-related feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage them.
In this model, emotion refers to a feeling state (including physiological responses and cognitions) that conveys information about relationships. For example, happiness is a feeling state that also conveys information about relationships -- typically, that one would like to join with others. Similarly, fear is a feeling state that corresponds to a relationship -- the urge to flee others. Intelligence. In this model, intelligence refers to the capacity to reason validly about information.
This use of the term emotional intelligence in this fashion is consistent with scientific literature in the fields of intelligence, personality psychology, and emotions (for more, see the similar discussion in this article). For example: Verbal intelligence concerns the mental ability to reason with and about verbal information, and of verbal knowledge to enhance thought. Spatial intelligence concerns the mental ability to reason with and about spatial information (i.e., the shape of objects and their orientation in space), and of spatial knowledge to enhance thought
References 1. Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D., & Salovey, P. (1999). Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence. Intelligence, 27, 267-298. 2. Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2000). Models of emotional intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.). Handbook of Intelligence (pp. 396-420). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
