Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognize the meaning 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.
Emotion: 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: Intelligence refers to the capacity to reason validly about information.
Emotional Intelligence - EQ - is a relatively recent behavioural model which rose to prominence with Daniel Goleman's 1995 Book called 'Emotional Intelligence'. The early Emotional Intelligence theory was originally developed during the 1970's and 80's by the work and writings of psychologists Howard Gardner (Harvard), Peter Salovey (Yale) and John Mayer (New Hampshire). Emotional Intelligence is becoming increasingly relevant to organizational development and developing people, because the EQ principles provide a new way to understand and assess people's behaviours, management styles, attitudes, interpersonal skills and potential. Emotional Intelligence is an important consideration in human resources planning, job profiling, recruitment interviewing and selection, management development, customer relations and customer service and more.
The EQ concept argues that IQ or conventional intelligence is too narrow; that there are wider areas of emotional intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. Success requires more than IQ (Intelligence Quotient), which has tended to be the traditional measure of intelligence, ignoring essential behavioural and character elements. We've all met people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially and inter-personally inept.
Emotional Intelligence - two aspects
Essential premise of EQ: To be successful requires the effective awareness, control and management of one's own emotions and those of other people. EQ embraces two aspects of intelligence:
- Understanding yourself, your goals, intentions, responses and behaviour
- Understanding others and their feelings
Emotional Intelligence - the five domains
Goleman identified the five 'domains' of EQ as:
- Knowing your emotions
- Managing your own emotions
- Motivating yourself
- Recognizing and understanding other people's emotions
- Managing relationships, i.e., managing the emotions of others
|
