In the 20th century, the concept of intelligence quotient (IQ) dominated American psychology. Parents were pleased if their children had high IQ and the few precocious children whose IQ developed faster than their peers were written about in the local newspapers. Tests were developed to measure this new thing called intelligence. Having tested it, psychologists called it the Intelligence Quotient. The American military found the concept useful and American education was close behind in adopting this new idea. Basically, the military just wanted to know if a recruit would be a good match for military service. But Education had other uses for the IQ. Perhaps few things characterize the American approach to life more than the fascination with technology and it’s uses. Americans don’t know a thing until they have measured it. Once having measured it, Americans always find something about it to fix.
Now in the 21st century, this mindset has discovered human emotions. This characteristic of American mentality is neither good nor bad. It’s just the way we are. We who possess this mentality cannot understand ephemeral things like emotions until we measure them. So we have. The measurement of our emotions has followed that of our intelligence in the last century. The IQ is the measured ability to use our intellect. The EQ is the measured ability to use our emotions. As with the IQ, having measured our ability to use our emotions, we have found things to fix. This article, however, will only discuss our capacity to measure our ability to use our emotions and its consequences for our lives.
Emotional Intelligence Appraisal
First, let’s look at the broad picture of our emotional intelligence (EQ). There are two broad dimensions of emotional intelligence, personal and social. As individuals, the experience of our emotions is very personal. No one has exactly the same experience of our emotions as we do. They belong to us authentically. Although other people cannot experience exactly our emotions, we have a social understanding of others of what the different emotions feel like. This common understanding gives our emotions a social dimension. Another factor in the social dimension is the fact that other people elicit emotional responses from us. When we interact with others, our emotions are always engaged.
Human life is interpersonal at a deep level. Humans have to have social connection and our emotions play a big part in those connections. Our ability to interact emotionally with others is as important as our ability to interact cognitively with our physical environment. So, our abilities to recognize and manage our emotions are as important as our abilities to analyze our physical environment. Our intelligence quotient (IQ) allows us to analyze our physical environment and our relationships with others. Our emotional quotient (EQ) allows us to respond in complex ways to other people. Our interactions with others allow us to create all aspects of our culture, sciences, arts, industries, etc. The differentiation and control of our emotions are a major factor in these achievements. Our IQ and our EQ are not totally separate abilities. They interact with one another.
Different Types Personal Skills
Let’s look at the skills involved in the personal dimension of emotional intelligence. One of the first things children learn about their emotions is to recognize them and name them. When the infant cries, she doesn’t know what she is experiencing. While learning to identify her emotions, the infant is also learning to regulate them. This process begins with infancy and continues throughout the lifespan. Naming of the emotions is the beginning of self-regulation. Another important emotional skill involves cognitive skills of intellectual intelligence. This is one place IQ and EQ interact. This skill is called cognitive re framing of emotions. Cognitive re framing is a type of emotional control. When you re frame an emotion, you change the context which elicited the emotion. For example, suppose your friend gets angry at you because you forgot to call him. Your friend accuses you of not caring about your friendship with him. This unexpected response surprises you and elicits an emotion of anger. Then you remember that your friend is experiencing much stress at work. You think that his anger is really a response to this stress at work rather than to you. Suddenly, you feel compassion for your friend rather than anger. You have used your IQ skills to re frame the emotion of anger. Re framing changed the emotion from anger to compassion. This is an important skill.
Another important skill of emotional intelligence is accepting your emotions. This basically means being able to fully experience an emotion. Human beings have the ability to suppress an emotion. There are many reasons why one would suppress an emotion. Shame is one. When one suppresses an emotion, the emotion is not experienced. This is a serious issue, because our emotions give us information about our environment, especially our social environment. If we are actually unhappy with a situation but our emotions tell us we are happy with that situation, we are at a disadvantage. Being able to accept our emotions is important and part of our emotional intelligence.
A fifth skill of EQ is to be in tune with your own needs and desires. This skill is an extension of being able to accept our emotions. Thriving requires us to accurately know what we need and want. Not only to know but to experience it. IQ gives us knowledge based on concepts and categories. EQ gives us knowledge based on emotions and experience. This kind of knowledge is much richer and complex than that based on concepts and categories. Thus, emotional intelligence give us a large quantity of information about our environment that is qualitatively rich.
The Social Dimension
A human being can survive only within a group of other humans. Our social skills are fundamental to who we are. Being to successfully interact with other humans is one of our most critical skills. Our prisons are full of people who have trouble interacting with others. One social interaction skill is awareness of the effects your emotions are having on others. In this skill, I must not only know what emotion I am experiencing, but also what emotion I am expressing and, furthermore, how that expression is affecting others. Thus, this skill has three levels of awareness. The similar skill on the personal level had just one level of awareness.
The second EQ skill involves emotional regulation. On the personal level, you have to regulate your own emotions. On the social level, regulation involves your emotion and your social partner’s emotion. For example, if I am talking to a friend about politics and my comments begin to make my friend angry, I have to modulate the comments I am making to ease my friends anger. In order to influence my friend’s emotions, I have to be in control of mine. This example reveals the complexity of emotional intelligence.
The third emotional skill is the ability to express your emotions appropriately given your particular context. For example, the expression of frustration in a bar should be very different from its expression in a synagogue. The two are different social contexts and emotional intelligence discriminates that difference and knows the proper expression to use in each.
The ability to express empathy for others is the fourth EQ skill. To feel empathy for others requires being able to view the situation from the other person’s perspective. To see a situation as the other person sees it. Not everyone can do this. This skill is very important in that empathy is required for social cohesion.
Benefits Emotional Intelligence
EQ is a pivotal skill. A pivotal skill is one that helps you learn many other skills. If you don’t have that pivotal skill, learning the other skills will be more difficult. Pivotal skills are important for acquiring many more complex skills. The skill of self-control requires emotional intelligence. If I can control my emotions and can discriminate the proper emotions for a given social context, then I am more likely to be able to control my own behavior in many social contexts where strong emotions are being expressed.
Another complex skill that requires emotional intelligence is leadership. This is not surprising as leadership involves influencing other people and it is through emotional connection that our influence occurs. With leadership, communication is another complex skill dependent upon emotional connection. While IQ does play a large role in communication, the content of information is largely categorical, these categories carry an emotional import. One cognitively understands words, but one feels them as well.
Self knowledge is an equally important skill dependent upon emotional intelligence. This might seem strange if we are accustomed to thinking of knowledge as IQ based. We feel who we are as much as we think who we are. We know what is meant when someone says, “I’m just not feeling myself, today.” What is interesting is that we would find it difficult to translate the emotions into words. I would say there is no translation; the emotions have a meaning of their own.
A fifth important skill involving EQ is stress management. While stress has a cognitive component, its core aspect is emotional. To control stress we perform actions like breathing deeply. Taking a series of slow, deep breaths will do more to release stress than anything you can say to yourself. This fact highlights the close relationship between our emotions and our bodies. Stress is both a cognitive and physical reaction to events in our environment. Like our intelligence from which it derives, our thinking is physical-mental. We think with both our bodies and our minds.
Conclusion
Emotional Intelligence, as a pivotal skill, influences as many other skills as does intellectual intelligence. In fact, EQ plays a critical role in our application of the skills of IQ to our daily lives. In the earlier part of the 20th century, psychiatry used the lobotomy as a tool to control extreme emotional dysfunction. This process scrambled the patient’s frontal lobes leaving the patient emotionally incapacitated. Such people were limited in their ability to manage their lives. The effect of the lobotomy reveals the critical role that emotional intelligence in our mental functioning. Emotional intelligence is an important skill whose role in our thinking is just beginning to be appreciated.