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Research Examples

Since 1990, Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer have been the leading researchers on emotional intelligence. In their influential article "Emotional Intelligence", they defined emotional intelligence as, "the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and motions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions" (1990).

The Four Branches of Emotional Intelligence

Salovey and Mayer proposed a model that identified four different factors of emotional intelligence : the perception of emotion, the ability to reason using emotions, the ability to understand emotion and the ability to manage emotions.

Perceiving Emotions: The first step in understanding emotions is to perceive them accurately. In many cases, this might involve understanding nonverbal signals such as body language and facial expressions.

Reasoning with Emotions: The next step involves using emotions to promote thinking and cognitive activity. Emotions help prioritize what we pay attention and react to; we respond emotionally to things that garner our attention.

Understanding Emotions: The emotions that we perceive can carry a wide variety of meanings. If someone is expressing angry emotions, the observer must interpret the cause of their anger and what it might mean. For example, if your boss is acting angry, it might mean that he is dissatisfied with your work; or it could be because he got a speeding ticket on his way to work that morning or that he's been fighting with his wife.

Managing Emotions: The ability to manage emotions effectively is a crucial part of emotional intelligence. Regulating emotions, responding appropriately and responding to the emotions of others are all important aspects of emotional management. 

According to Salovey and Mayer, the four branches of their model are,"arranged from more basic psychological processes to higher, more psychologically integrated processes. For example, the lowest level branch concerns the (relatively) simple abilities of perceiving and expressing emotion. In contrast, the highest level branch concerns the conscious, reflective regulation of emotion" (1997).

An Article by Dan Goleman, December 1995

You've got the intellectual credentials: You did pretty well in school, maybe have a college diploma or even an advanced degree. You got high scores on your SATs and GREs, or even on the holy grail of the intellect, the IQ test. You may even be in Mensa, the select high-IQ club.

That's fine when it comes to intelligence of the academic variety. But how bright are you outside the classroom, when it comes to life's sticker moments? There you need other kinds of resourcefulness - most especially emotional intelligence, a different way of being smart.

High IQ & High E-IQ

Emotional Intelligence gives you a competitive edge. Even at Bell Labs, where everyone is smart, studies find that the most valued and productive engineers are those with the traits of emotional intelligence - not necessarily the highest IQ. Having great intellectual abilities may make you a superb fiscal analyst or legal scholar, but a highly developed emotional intelligence will make you a candidate for CEO or a brilliant trial lawyer.

Empathy and other qualities of the heart make it more likely that your marriage will thrive. Lack of those abilities explains why people of high IQ can be such disastrous pilots of their personal lives.

An analysis of the personality traits that accompany high IQ in men who also lack these emotional competencies portrays, well, the stereotypical nerd: critical and condescending, inhibited and uncomfortable with sensuality, emotionally bland. By contrast, men with the traits that mark emotional intelligence are poised and outgoing, committed to people and causes, sympathetic and caring, with a rich but appropriate emotional life - they're comfortable with themselves, others, and the social universe they live in.

"A high IQ may get you into Mensa, but it won't make you a mensch."

 

Attribution and References

Bachman, J., Stein, S., Campbell, K., & Sitarenios, G. (2000). Emotional intelligence in the collection of debt. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 8(3), 176-182.

Boyatzis, R.E. (1999). From a presentation to the Linkage Conference on Emotional Intelligence, Chicago, IL, September 27, 1999.

Boyatzis, R. (1982). The competent manager: A model for effective performance. New York: JOhn Wiley and Sons.

Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam.

Hay/McBer Research and Innovation Group (1997). This research was provided to Daniel Goleman and is reported in his book (Goleman, 1998).

Hunter, J.E., Schmidt F.L., & Judlesch, M. K. (1990). Individual Differences In Output Variability as a Function of Job Complexity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75, 28-42.

Lusch, R. F., & Serpkeuci, R. (1990). Personal differences, job tension, job outcomes, and store performances: A study of retail managers. Journal of Marketing.

McClelland, D. C. (1999). Identifying competencies with behavioral-event interviews. Psychological Science, 9(5), 331-339.

Pesuric, A., & Byham, W. (1996, July). The new look in behavior modeling. Training and Development, 25-33.

Porras, J. I., & Anderson, B. (1981). Improving managerial effectiveness through modeling-based training. Organization Dynamics, 9, 60-77.

Richman, L. S. (1994, May 16). How to get ahead in America. Fortune, 46-54.

Seligman M. E. P. (1990). Learned optimism. New York: Knopf.

Spencer, L. M., Jr., & Spencer, S. (1993(. Competence at work: Models for superior performance. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Spencer, L. M. J., McClelland, D. C., & Kelner, S. (1997). Competency assessment methods: History and state of the art. Boston: Hay/McBer.

Walter V. Clarke Associates. (1996). Activity vector analysis: Some applications to the concept of emotional intelligence. Pittsburgh, PA: Walter V. Clarke Associates.