Structure:-
1) Introduction
2) Concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI)
3) Definition of Emotional Intelligence
4) What Emotional Intelligence ‘is’ and is ‘not’
5) Historical Development of Emotional Intelligence
6) Components of Emotional Intelligence
7) Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence: Relationship between IQ and EQ
8) Benefits of Emotional Intelligence
9) Conclusion
INTRODUCTION
Emotional intelligence (EI) reflects the current view in modern neuroscience wherein emotions are framed as sources of useful data about our environment, rather than hindrances or disruptors in rational thinking.
Using emotions intelligently can provide competitive advantage in a world where technical knowledge and “booksmarts” may be in abundance, but the ability to deal with uncertainty, frustration, conflicts and interpersonal relationships may be scarce.
In a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) social reality, being attuned to one’s own and others’ emotions can help us tap into a unique kind of resource to navigate the world.
While many of us are already familiar with general or cognitive intelligence given the emphasis placed on Intelligence Quotient (IQ) in academic and professional contexts, emotional intelligence is a relatively new concept that is still under development and research.
Here we will introduce the construct and provide context and background for its emergence. And also examine why IQ is not sufficient to ensure success in today’s world and why EI is receiving so much attention across domains.
CONCEPT OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The term emotional intelligence can be broken down into two concepts- emotions and intelligence. If one is asked about emotions in general terms, the first responses are likely to constitute a perspective on emotions that is inherently restrictive. Most commonly, emotions are seen to make us inefficient, are a sign of weakness, a distraction and obstacle to good judgment and decision making.The two words in the term emotional intelligence can then be seen to contradict each other, if viewed from this lens.
However, modern neuroscience has served to debunk these myths and highlighted several important functions that emotions serve. We now know that emotions provide vital feedback and information about our world, spark creativity, aid decision making, enhance reasoning and strengthen trust and connection- all of which are crucial if we are to not just function but thrive as human beings.
In fact, the word emotion itself derives from the Latin word “motere” or “movere” meaning “to move”, to stir up, to agitate or to excite. Emotional intelligence leverages and expands on these ideas by proposing that thinking (including memory, judgment, reasoning) and emotions go together.
Emotions assist thinking and thinking can be used to analyse and regulate emotions. For example, anger signals the presence of an obstacle and gives one energy to fight. Fear is a survival emotion that protects from danger by taking our attention to possible threats. Trust flags the presence of a sense of safety and motivates one to open up to connections.
Thus, while emotions may be seen to disrupt thinking in some situations, they also signal where one’s attention needs to be directed in a given situation.
Some basic principles about emotions that are relevant to emotional intelligence are :
1. Emotions are information and present useful data about our worlds.
2. Decisions must incorporate emotions in order to be effective and lead to intended outcomes. For example, Reinhard & Schwartz have found that people in a less positive or even negative mood perceive truthful information more effectively than those in a positive mood.
3. We can try to ignore emotions but it doesn’t work, especially over long periods of time. Suppressing and hiding emotions takes up valuable mental energy that could have been directed at an important task and is highly stressful when continued for long.
4. We can try to hide emotions but are not as good at it as we might think. Most people are able to read tiny, fleeting changes in emotional expressions and interpret them correctly, such as identifying a fake smile by noticing the lack of movement of the eye muscles while smiling.
Given the above, dismissing or ignoring emotions may not be a realistic goal if we are to function healthily. Instead, it may be worthwhile to consider how we might use emotions intelligently so that they help us thrive.
Definition of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (EI) is a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way. Several definitions of emotional intelligence have been proposed over the years.
One of the most popular definitions is “Emotional intelligence is the capacity for recognising our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships”
Just as intelligence is quantified and measured through Intelligence Quotient (IQ) emotional intelligence is indicated by Emotional Quotient or EQ.
Over decades of research, it has been established that EI is a distinct ability that does not share attributes with either personality or intelligence. Having certain personality traits does not automatically predispose one to have high or low emotional intelligence.
For example, while extroverts may feel energised by interacting with people and introverts share a preference for solitude, it does not automatically imply that extroverts are more emotionally intelligent than introverts. Similarly, having an ability to process information cognitively or intelligence, does not indicate one’s level of EI.
In addition, while personality and intelligence are relatively stable and resistant to change after the age of 18-20 years, EI comprises a dynamic component that has the potential to evolve and grow over time, as well as with targeted interventions.
“Emotional intelligence is learned. Unlike IQ, which is essentially fixed within narrow parameters at birth, EQ can be developed and enhanced. In other words, temperament is not destiny. Empathy and the capacity to understand the emotions of others can be nurtured.” In fact, several studies have shown that older participants tend to score higher on EI measures and may indicate that EQ increases with age and maturation.
Thus, in order to consider ‘the whole person’, emotional intelligence must be considered alongside personality and intelligence.
What Emotional Intelligence ‘is’ and is ‘not’
What emotional intelligence ‘is’:
- Being aware of oneself
- Being able to manage emotions
- Being socially aware
- Ability to manage interpersonal relationships by using emotions
- A field of scientific study
What emotional intelligence is ‘not’:
- Ignoring or suppressing emotions
- Allowing emotions to dominate thinking and decision making
- A permanent trait
- An indicator of cognitive and academic intelligence
- A person’s aptitude or interest
- Avoidance of conflict
- Best predictor of success in life
As Aristotle has put it, “ Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy”. Hence, getting aware of the emotions, and knowing proper ways to express emotions are crucial for success in life.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The concept of emotional intelligence has its roots in early psychologists’ conceptualisation of intelligence. Thorndike in 1920 proposed that intelligence is comprised of three distinct domains or classes:
(i) Abstract, analytic or verbal;
(ii) Mechanical, performance and visuo-spatial;
(iii) Social or practical.
Thorndike, thus, expanded on the traditional view of ‘intelligence’ as being purely cognitive by identifying several other kinds of intelligences. Specifically, his social/practical intelligence component indicates emotional intelligence aspect.
Howard Gardner (1983) further identified eight different abilities: musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal- linguistic, bodilykinesthetic, logical-mathematical, intrapersonal, interpersonal and naturalistic.
Here, the intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences are related to aspects of emotional intelligence. Another psychologist, Sternberg (1985) talked about three types of intelligence such as analytical, creative and practical intelligence.
In all these notions of intelligence, we can see the building blocks of emotional intelligence – social intelligence, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences, and practical intelligence can all be said to reflect emotional intelligence abilities.
Salovey & Mayer are widely credited with first using the term ‘emotional intelligence’ in 1990. However, they themselves acknowledge that the term was used much earlier in passing in the 1960s in literary criticism and psychiatry and eventually in a dissertation by Payne in 1986.
The construct remained largely unknown until it attained popularity when Daniel Goleman published his book on the subject in 1995 and argued that ‘people with the highest levels of intelligence (IQ) outperform those with average IQs just 20 percent of the time, while people with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70 percent of the time’.
His assertion that EI could predict job performance and success held intuitive appeal and since then, the concept has become extremely mainstream and received international attention among several domains such as mental health, business, education etc.
COMPONENTS OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Broadly, emotional intelligence can be viewed as having four interrelated components:-
1. Perceiving emotions: This is the basic ability to register and recognise emotions in ourselves and other people. People who are high in emotional intelligence are able to identify when they are experiencing a particular emotion and able to use their vocabulary to label the feeling.
For example, experiencing the sensation of “butterflies in the stomach” and knowing that they are feeling nervousness or anxiety. They are also sensitive to other people’s emotions and are able to see when someone is feeling angry, sad, happy or a range of other feelings by reading their facial expressions and body language. This is a fundamental skill because without recognising the experience of an emotion, it is very difficult to understand it or change it in any way.
2. Understanding emotions: This component refers to using the specific information that various emotions provide and knowing how that might affect their behavior. As discussed earlier, each emotion conveys distinct data to individuals about their environment and energizes one for action in a particular direction.
Emotionally intelligent people are able to ‘read’ this information and use it to guide their behaviour. For example, understanding that one’s anger at their friend may be a result of feeling unfairly treated by them. Understanding emotions in others is similar- observing that a sibling is hanging their head low and has reduced their interactions with others might indicate they are upset or sad about something
3. Managing emotions: When one recognises their emotions quickly and understands their meaning, it becomes relatively easier for them to think about the next steps regarding how to change them. This applies to the self as well as others. Recognising that one is feeling low and wanting to change that emotion may encourage one to make plans to go out for a movie or meet a friend they enjoy talking to or just talk to the person over phone.
A desire to reduce one’s anger may also lead to the use of deep breathing and relaxation strategies to calm oneself down. Similar tools may be used to help change emotions in others as well. For example, saying sorry or apologising to an angry friend may reduce anger or sadness. Listening to a sibling who is feeling sad may improve their mood.
4. Using emotions: The ability to use one’s emotions is more than just dealing with or managing emotions. It involves the skill of leveraging emotions to enhance our thinking, decision-making and relationships.
For example, concealing one’s nervousness about public speaking by using body language and hand gestures to show excitement instead so that the audience is more engaged. Channelizing anger at perceived injustice towards fighting for one’s legitimate rights is another example of using emotions and has been used extensively to bring about social changes and reforms for centuries.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IQ AND EQ
When we use the word “intelligence”, usually we refer to cognitive intelligence or academic intelligence. However, there are other types of intelligences also such as social and emotional intelligence.
The most well known and referenced definition of intelligence is probably that of Wechsler’s – “intelligence is the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment”.
The highest level of cognitive mental abilities is called general mental ability or ‘g’, which is thought to predict learnability and performance across domains. ‘g’ is further classified into fluid and crystallised forms of intelligence.
Fluid intelligence is a measure of the abilities of information processing and reasoning. Crystallized intelligence has to do with acquiring, retaining and organising information and is different from information processing.
Furnham, have explained this with the help of an analogy. If cognitive intelligence is a computer, fluid intelligence would be the information processor (computer chip) while crystallised intelligence is analogous to the information stored in memory (hard drive).
Having a high IQ does not automatically indicate a high EQ, while having a high EQ may indicate a high or average IQ at least and predict success at work better than IQ alone. While IQ can predict academic success, it may not necessarily lead to success in life; whereas EQ predicts success and effectiveness in life. Given the importance of emotional intelligence, it may be noted here that unlike intelligence, emotional intelligence can be increased through training at any age.
IQ can therefore be considered a minimum requirement or “threshold competence”, for example, in getting into an academic institute through an entrance exam or a job in an organization on the basis of degrees and certifications attained.
Success thereafter, is determined by many more varied skills that must be built upon this. Emotional competence needs to supplement intellectual competence. A sub-set of emotional intelligence, emotional competence is defined as “a learned capability based on emotional intelligence that results in outstanding performance at work”
For example, one may have adequate baseline emotional intelligence but will still need to learn the specific competency of empathy to influence relationships with peers or superiors for success. Goleman has proposed five emotional competencies such as Self awareness, Motivation, Self-regulation, Empathy and Social skills.
BENEFITS OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The concept of emotional intelligence has become very popular and is steadily gaining traction because of the many benefits it purports to offer to these who have this capacity. Some of these benefits are:
1. Allows individuals to tap into not just thinking capacities, but also leverage information and strengths that emotions bring.
2. Takes a realistic and practical view of emotions as opposed to traditional notions that encourage leaving emotions out of certain contexts and encourage unhealthy suppression.
3. Facilitates understanding of self and others, beyond superficial information.
4. Encourages and enables empathy so that the quality of interpersonal interactions improves.
5. Adds competitive advantage over just cognitive intelligence and technical skills so that individuals are able to pursue excellence and success using a range of intelligences.
6. Allows individuals more agency and control over which emotions they would like to experience more of and which ones they consider undesirable in a given situation and would like to switch from.
Conclusion
Emotional intelligence has emerged as an exciting domain of study over the last 30 years or so, even though usage of the term and recognition of related skills has been around for several decades. The term is composed of two units- emotion and intelligence and arises out of the synthesis of these seemingly incompatible domains. Emotions can influence thinking and in turn, thinking can be used to make sense of and employ emotions effectively.
It is now well established that the abilities that comprise emotional intelligence and are concerned with recognising, regulating and using emotions to drive effective decision-making are crucial to adaptive functioning and optimal performance. There has been much debate about its distinctiveness as a construct and mixed evidence for its exponential impact on performance when compared with cognitive intelligence.
However, when taken together with cognitive intelligence, especially in social tasks, emotional intelligence can boost the impact of the former and yield tangible results.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.