Emotional intelligence
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Definition
Emotional
intelligence is the
ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It
is generally said to include three skills: emotional awareness; the
ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and
problem solving; and the ability to manage emotions, which includes
regulating your own emotions and cheering up or calming down other
people.
Explanation
It is the capability of individuals to recognize their own, and
other people's emotions,
to discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, to use
emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and to manage and/or
adjust emotions to adapt environments or achieve one's goal(s).
Although
the term first appeared in a 1964 paper by Michael Beldoch, it gained popularity in the 1995 book by that title, written by the author,
psychologist, and science journalist Daniel
Goleman. Since this time, Goleman's 1995 analysis of EI has been
criticized within the scientific community, despite prolific
reports of its usefulness in the popular press. There are currently several
models of EI. Goleman's original model may now be considered a mixed model that combines what have subsequently
been modeled separately as ability
EI and trait EI. Goleman defined EI as the
array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance. The trait
model was developed by Konstantin
Vasily Petrides in 2001. It "encompasses behavioral dispositions and self-perceived
abilities and is measured through self-report". The ability
model, developed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 2004, focuses on the individual's
ability to process emotional information and use it to navigate the social environment.
Studies
have shown that people with high EI have greater mental health, job
performance, and leadership
skills although no causal relationships have been shown and such findings are
likely to be attributable to general intelligence and specific personality traits rather than emotional intelligence as
a construct. For example, Goleman indicated that EI accounted for 67% of the
abilities deemed necessary for superior performance in leaders, and mattered
twice as much as technical expertise or IQ. Other
research finds that the effect of EI on leadership and managerial performance
is non-significant when ability and personality are controlled for, and that general intelligence
correlates very closely with leadership. Markers
of EI and methods of developing it have become more widely coveted in the past
decade. In addition, studies have begun to provide evidence to help
characterize the neural mechanisms of emotional intelligence.
Criticisms have centered on whether EI is a
real intelligence and whether it has incremental validity over IQ and the Big Five personality traits. Review finds that, in most studies,
poor research methodology has exaggerated the significance of EI.
Models
of Emotional Intelligence
However,
substantial disagreement exists regarding the definition of EI, with respect to
both terminology and operationalizations. Currently, there are three main
models of EI:
1.
Ability model
2.
Mixed model (usually subsumed under trait EI)
3.
Trait model
Different
models of EI have led to the development of various instruments for the assessment of
the construct. While some of these measures may overlap, most researchers agree
that they tap different constructs.
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 (Lyubomirsky et al. 2005). A person
who is more responsive emotionally to crucial issues will attend to the more
crucial aspects of his or her life. Aspects of emotional facilitation factor is
to also know how to include or exclude emotions from thought depending on
context and situation.This is also related to emotional reasoning and
understanding in response to the people, environment and circumstances one
encounters in his or her day-to-day life.
Ability Model
Salovey and
Mayer's conception of EI strives to define EI within the confines of the
standard criteria for a new intelligence. Following their continuing
research, their initial definition of EI 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 EI 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
ability-based model views emotions as useful sources of information that help
one to make sense of and navigate the social environment. 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
cognition. This ability is seen to manifest itself in certain adaptive
behaviors. The model claims that EI 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 his or
her changing moods in order to best fit the task at
hand.
3.
Understanding emotions – the ability to
comprehend emotion language and to appreciate complicated relationships among
emotions. For example, understanding emotions encompasses 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 EI
model has been criticized in the research for lacking face and predictive
validity in the workplace. However, in terms of construct validity,
ability EI tests have great advantage over self-report scales of EI because
they compare individual maximal performance to standard performance scales and
do not rely on individuals' endorsement of descriptive statements about
themselves.
Mixed Model
The model
introduced by Daniel Goleman focuses on EI as a wide array of
competencies and skills that drive leadership performance. Goleman's model
outlines five main EI constructs:
1.
Self-awareness –
the ability to know one's emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values and
goals and recognize their impact on others while using gut feelings to
guide decisions.
2.
Self-regulation – involves
controlling or redirecting one's disruptive emotions and impulses and adapting
to changing circumstances.
3.
Social skill –
managing relationships to move people in the desired direction
4.
Empathy – considering other people's feelings especially
when making decisions
5.
Motivation –
being driven to achieve for the sake of achievement
Goleman
includes a set of emotional competencies within each
construct of EI. Emotional competencies are not innate talents, but rather
learned capabilities that must be worked on and can be developed to achieve
outstanding performance. Goleman posits that individuals are born with a
general emotional intelligence that determines their potential for learning
emotional competencies. Goleman's model of EI has been criticized in the
research literature as mere "pop
psychology".
Trait Model
Konstantinos
Vasilis Petrides ("K. V. Petrides") proposed a conceptual distinction
between the ability based model and a trait based
model of EI and has been developing the latter over many years in numerous
publications. Trait EI is "a constellation of emotional
self-perceptions located at the lower levels of personality." In lay
terms, trait EI refers to an individual's self-perceptions of their emotional
abilities. This definition of EI encompasses behavioral dispositions and
self-perceived abilities and is measured by self-report, as opposed to the ability
based model which refers to actual abilities, which have proven highly
resistant to scientific measurement. Trait EI should be investigated within a personality framework. An alternative
label for the same construct is trait emotional self-efficacy.
The trait EI
model is general and subsumes the Goleman model discussed above. The
conceptualization of EI as a personality trait leads to a construct that lies
outside the taxonomy of human cognitive ability. This
is an important distinction in as much as it bears directly on the
operationalization of the construct and the theories and hypotheses that are
formulated about it.
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