In today’s lecture we will looks at what psychologists and brain physiologists call emotional intelligence, particularly how it leads to success. Emotional intelligence consists of two basic personal capabilities. First, it’s an awareness that emotions can drive our behaviour and impact us in both positive and negative ways. Second, it’s also coupled with an ability to manage emotions—our own and other people’s—which is particularly important when we behave and interact with others under pressure.
Emotional intelligence consists of several distinct components. First, there's self-awareness, meaning an ability to recognize and understand one's own emotions.
Next, there's self-regulation, meaning an ability to understand and regulate emotions. People who are high in emotional intelligence are also good at managing their emotions, even under conditions of high stress.
The third component of emotional intelligence is intrinsic motivation. People who are internally motivated to pursue their goals work on things they find enjoyable, interesting, and challenging. They aren't driven primarily by external factors. A strong internal drive tends to lead to better outcomes.
A fourth component is empathy, meaning the ability to easily imagine the world from someone else's perspective. This ability helps individuals understand and manage the emotions of people around them. It also helps them work well with other people, build, and maintain relationships, and resolve conflicts in constructive ways.
The final component of emotional intelligence is social skills. People who are high in emotional intelligence listen and communicate effectively. They also take responsibility when things don't go well and give credit to those around them when things go well.
Virtually all jobs involve working with other people in some capacity. Having an ability to get along with people and understand their point of view is clearly an asset. People who are emotionally intelligent are good at intuiting other people's emotions based on subtle cues, such as facial expressions, body posture, and tone of voice.
They're also better at working with people and getting other people to want to work with them. That helps explain why they get more done and tend to earn higher salaries. Emotionally intelligent people are also especially effective at challenging the status quo and helping make change happen in a positive and productive way.
One of the most frequently researched topics is the link between emotional intelligence and academic achievement. In 2020, a comprehensive review took place of the strongest predictors of school performance, as measured by grades as well as standardized test scores. It found that emotional intelligence, along with high intelligence and a conscientious personality, were the three factors most strongly linked with academic success.
What explains this link between emotional intelligence and school success? Emotional intelligence is multifaceted, so the link is probably also multifaceted. Students who are better at managing negative emotions like anxiety, boredom, or disappointment will be less likely to have such feelings interfere with their academic performance.
Being better at managing social relationships with classmates and teachers may allow them to work better with a partner or in a small group and be comfortable asking a teacher for help when they don’t understand something. And intrinsic motivation makes it easier to persevere until one understands academic material.
One comprehensive analysis of people in nearly 200 different jobs published in 2010 found that emotional intelligence was strongly linked to better performance only in those jobs where paying attention to and managing emotions is directly tied to success. They described these jobs as high in «emotional labour».
For people in particular jobs, such as salespeople, real estate agents, counsellors, and call-centre representatives, knowing how to read emotions and respond effectively is an essential aspect of success, especially in stressful situations. But for people in jobs where reading emotions isn’t important, emotional intelligence actually is not linked with success.
In fact, for some particular types of jobs, such as mechanics, scientists, and factory workers, more EQ was actually associated with weaker job performance. One explanation is that paying attention to emotions can distract from the typical requirements of some jobs.
Also, it is worth mentioning that emotional intelligence can have a dark side if developed in isolation from other traits, such as conscientiousness. After all, an ability to understand and manage emotions is a skill that can be used for negative as well as positive outcomes.
Researchers at the University of Toronto have found that for people with self-serving, Machiavellian tendencies, skills in emotional intelligence can be used to manipulate, embarrass, and undermine other people for personal gain. The takeaway point is that skills of emotional intelligence need to be supported by other skills or attributes to lead to positive outcomes.
Given the benefits of emotional intelligence, there has been interest in both schools and businesses in teaching these abilities as skills that can be learned. Many schools and universities around the globe now provide some type of training in these skills, under the expectation that fostering social and emotional skills will lead to better academic performance. Additionally, numerous medical schools and hospitals have started providing training in emotional intelligence for doctors.
Now we will conclude with a look at what we know about developing the abilities underlying emotional intelligence. First, a person's level of emotional intelligence tends to have a relatively stable baseline across the life span. It can change, but without deliberate effort it operates much like a personality trait or metabolism or other generally stable characteristic. This probably means that emotional intelligence reflects some combination of early childhood experiences and genetics.
Second, for most people, emotional intelligence does tend to increase with age, with a peak appearing at about age 60. This resembles the trend toward increasing crystallized intelligence as we get older.
Third, the fact that people develop greater emotional intelligence with more life experience suggests that emotional intelligence involves skills that can be taught at any age. For instance, it is possible to learn and improve social skills. Many training programs designed to increase emotional intelligence focus on teaching active listening and dialogue skills.
Another strategy is increasing empathy for other people. While it's certainly true that some people are naturally more empathetic than others, anyone can develop this ability with practice. In fact, researchers at Stanford University have found that simply telling someone that empathy can be developed increases their willingness to try to understand someone else's perspective.
Researchers also found that viewing high-quality televised dramas, which expose us to different people's emotions, can play an essential role in increasing our emotional intelligence by getting our brain to practice how to pick up emotional cues from different life scenarios.
It has been found that women in general are better at identifying the correct emotion than men and women generally tend to be higher in emotional intelligence than men. This could be because women are biologically more attuned to emotions as they are responsible for rearing the children more than their male partners or because women are taught to pay more attention to emotions and therefore develop skills in emotion regulation.
The idea that emotional intelligence is some combination of innate biology and learned behaviour illustrates a broader disagreement within the psychology community about how to understand emotional intelligence. The fact that emotional intelligence can improve with more life experience and training has led critics to say that it should be called a set of skills rather than the more fixed and stable type of ability implied by the word intelligence. Therefore, a better term to describe what emotional intelligence is could be emotional life skills that can be enhanced and developed during the course of our lives.