Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

The whole of Steven Hein's 1996 book EQ for Everyone is free on line from his website

1. Signs of High and Low EQ

Steve Hein suggest the general characteristics of people of high and low EQ as guidelines

A person with high EQ:

A person with low EQ :

2. The Ten Habits of EEI People
(EEI = Enlightened and Emotionally Intelligent)

Steve Hein combining his ideas with the others as Stephen Covey, John Mayer, Peter Solavey, and David Caruso.

High EQ people :


1. Label their feelings, rather than labelling people or situations.

"I feel impatient." vs. "This is ridiculous"

"I feel hurt and bitter". vs. "You are an insensitive jerk."

"I feel afraid." vs. "You are driving like a idiot."

2. Distinguish between thoughts and feelings.

Thoughts: I feel like ... & I feel as if... & 1 feel that Feelings:

I feel: (feeling word)

3. Take responsibility for their feelings.

"I feel jealous." vs. "You are making me jealous"'

4. Use their feelings to help them make decisions.

"How will I feel if I do this?" "How will I feel if I don't"

5. Show respect for other people's feelings

They ask "How will you feel if I do this?" "How Will you feel if I don't."


6. Feel energized, not angry.

They use what others call "anger" to help them feel energized to take productive action.


7. Validate other people's feelings.

They show empathy, understanding, and acceptance of other people's feelings.

8. Practice getting a positive value from their negative emotions.

They ask themselves: "How do I feel?" and "What would help me feel better?"

They ask others "How do you feel?" and "What would help you feel better?"

9. Don't advise, command, control, criticize, judge or lecture to others

They realize it doesn't feel good to be on the receiving end of such behavior, so they avoid it.

10. Avoid people who invalidate them, or don't respect their feelings.

As much as possible, they choose to associate only with bother people with high EQ.

3. The Emotional Competence Framework

Daniel Goleman suggested both personal and social competence in his book Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998).

A. Personal Competence

These competencies determine how we manage ourselves.

Self-Awareness

Knowing one's internal state, preference, resource and intuition.

Emotional awareness : Recognizing one's emotions and their effects

Accurate self-assessment: Knowing one's strengths and limits

Self-confidence: A strong sense of one's self-worth and capabilities Self-Regulation

Managing one's internal state, impulses and resources

Self-Control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check

Trustworthiness: Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity

Conscientiousness: Taking responsibility for personal performance

Adaptability: Flexibility in handing change

Innovation: Being comfortable with novel ideas, approach and new information Motivation

Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals

Achievement drive: Striving to improve or meet a standard of excellence

Commitment: Aligning with the goals of the group or organization

Initiative: Readiness to act on opportunities

Optimism: Persistence in pursuing goal despite obstacles and setbacks

B. Social Competence

These competencies determine how we handle relationships.

Empathy

Awareness of others feelings, needs and concerns

Understanding others: Sensing others feelings and perspectives and taking an active interest in their concern

Developing others: Sensing others' development needs and bolstering their abilities

Service orientation: Anticipating, recognizing and meeting customer needs

Leveraging diversity: Cultivating opportunities through different kinds of people

Political awareness: Reading a group's emotional currents and power relationships Social Skills

Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others

Influence: Wielding effective tactics for persuasion

Communication: Listening openly and sending convincing messages

Conflict management: Negotiating and resolving disagreements

Leadership: Inspiring and guiding individuals and groups

Change catalyst: Initiating or maining change

Building bonds: Nurturing instrumental relationships

Collaboration and cooperation: Working with others toward shared goals

Team capabilities: Creating group synergy in persuing collective goal

References

Daniel Goleman. Emotional Intelligence –Why it can matter more than IQ. New York. 1995.

Daniel Goleman. Working with Emotional Intelligence. Clays Ltd., UK. 1998

John Mayer and Glen Geher. Emotional Intelligence and the Identification of Emotion. in Intelligence, vol.22 (2), Mar-Apr 1996, 89-104.

John Mayer, Peter Salovey, and David Caruso. Emotional Intelligence Meets Standards for Intelligence. New York. 1999.

Editor of Psychology Today. Psychology Today Vol. 32. An interview with John Mayer. July/August 1999. (http://www.equi.org/)

Suggested Web Sites

4. Emotional Intelligence

This article retrieved from a Google search http://www.google.com/search?q=EQ%20vs%20IQ 07/12/05 from the virtual library of a TQM site in Brunei. This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:6oLEd-0DFfAJ:www.voctech.org.bn/virtual_lib/Programme/Regular/Emerging99/EQ%2520Vs%2520IQ.htm+EQ+vs+IQ&hl=en&lr=&strip=0 as retrieved on 4 Dec 2005 21:52:06 GMT

The original article with images and links is at http://www.voctech.org.bn/virtual_lib/Programme/Regular/Emerging99/EQ%20Vs%20IQ.htm

Introduction

For decades that a lot of emphasis has been put on certain aspects of intelligence such as logical reasons, math skills, spatial skills, understanding analogies, verbal skills, etc. The knowledge that IQ is a genetic given that cannot be changed by life experience, and that our destiny in life is largely fixed by these aptitudes. That argument ignores the more challenging question : What can we change that will help our children fare better in life ? What factors are at play when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well ? The same as that researchers were puzzled by the fact that while IQ could predict to a significant degree academic performance and , to some degree, professional and personal success, there was something missing in the equation.

The major missing parts in the success equation has been observed among the psychologists, scientists, neurologists, and neuroscientists for some decades. Several research are conducted for the purpose of finding the answer to the question that some of those with fabulous IQ score were doing poorly in life. And fortunately at the decade of arriving the millennium it is agreeable among knowledgeable people that the difference of the success quite often lies in the abilities called emotional intelligence. This includes self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motive oneself.

Difference researchers define emotions differently. Jack Mayer, a researcher who in partnership with Peter Salovey as well as coauthor of several books on emotions and emotional intelligence, states that there are biologcally-oriented researchers who define emotions as very close to simple biological states, or electro-chemical reactions. There are psychologists who defines emotions as conscious experience. Most people who study emotions are somewhere in between and they view emotions as a coordinated response system, so that an emotion occurs when there are certain biological, certain experiential, and certain cognitive states which all occur simultaneously.

J-P Du Preez, an organizational consultant and a senior lecturer at Potchefststroom University in south Africa., defines that emotions originate from exposure to specific situations. The nature and the intensity of the emotion are usually related to cognitive activity in the form of the perception of the situation. That thought process or perception results in the experience and / or the expression of related feeling.

Maurice Elias, a coauthor of Emotionally Intelligent Parenting of Promoting Social and Emotional Learning and a professor of education at Rutgers University, defines that emotions are human beings' warning systems as to what is really going on around them . Emotions are the most reliable indicators of how things are going in our lives. They are also like an internal gyroscope; emotions help keep us on the right track by making sure that we are led by more than cognition. In the mean time, Eric Jensen who is the author of The Learning Brain, Brain-Based Learning, director of Jensen's Learning, and a cofounder of SuperCamp, cited precisely that emotion is biologically driven driven and cross-cultural responses to environmental stimuli.

In other words, emotions operate on many levels. They have a physical aspect as well as a psychological aspect.

It is agreeable among the researchers who are educators, phychologists, nueologists , scientists and others that emotion is an intelligence as indeed meets the traditional criteria of a standard intelligence. John Mayer, David Caruso, and Peter Salovey revealed in Emotional Intelligence Meets Traditional Standards for an Intelligence that the necessary criteria for declaring something an intelligence are as follows : • It can be broken down into a set of mental abilities. • The abilities coming from the intelligence must form a related set. They must be intercorrelated --they must rise and fall as a group. • The abilities must have a significant positive correlation to traditional intelligence. • The abilities of intelligence should "develop with age and experience."

Importance of Emotions

It is recognized that emotions have effect on human behaviors and lead to the success of lives in careers , relationships, happiness and others. Steve Hein (1999) clarified the importance of emotions as being importance to human beings as :

Survival

Nature developed our emotions over millions of years of evolution. As a result, our emotions have the potential to serve us today as a delicate and sophisticated internal guidance system. Our emotions alert us when natural human needs is not being met. For example , when we feel lonely, our need for connection with other people is unmet. When we feel afraid, our need for safety is unmet. When we feel rejected, it is our need for acceptance which is unmet.

Decision Making

Our emotions are valuable source of information. Our emotions help us make decisions. Studies show that when a person's emotional connections are severed in the brain, he cannot make even simple decisions. Why? Because he doesn't know how he will feel about his choices.

Boundary Setting

When we feel uncomfortable with a person's behavior, our emotions alert us. If we learn to trust our emotions and feel confident expressing ourselves we can let the person know we feel uncomfortable as soon as we are aware of our feeling. This will help us set our boundaries which are necessary to protect our physical and mental health.

Communication

Our emotions help us communicate with others. Our facial expressions, for example, can convey a wide range of emotions. If we look sad or hurt, we are signaling to others that we need their help. If we are verbally skilled, we will be able to express more of our emotional needs and thereby have a better chance of filling them. If we are effective at listening to the emotional troubles of others, we are better able to help them feel understood, important and cared about.

Unity

Our emotions are perhaps the greatest potential source of uniting all members of the human species. Clearly, our various religious, cultural and political beliefs have not united us. Far too often, in fact, they have tragically and even fatally divided us. Emotions , on the other hand, are universal. Charles Darwin wrote about this years ago in one of his lesser-known book called "The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animal". The emotions of empathy, compassion, cooperation, and forgiveness, for instance, all have the potential to unite us as a species.

Emotional Intelligence

Steve Hein, a psychologist and a writer as well wrote in 1999 that emotional Intelligence ( EI ) has been touted as the key to success in all spheres of life : school, work, relationships. But according to John Mayer, Ph.D., who originated the concept of EI with Yale psychologist Peter Salovey, Ph.D., they declare that they still have a lot to learn about this skill while John Mayer,Ph.D., a psychology professor at the university of New Hampshire recently clarified the uses and meanings of EI as :

Emotional intelligence involves the abilities to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the abilities to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

Mayer explained that EI is a group of mental abilities which help recognize and understand one's own feelings and others'. Ultimately, IE leads to the ability to regulate one's feelings. There are two sides to it. One side involves the intellect understanding emotion. The other side involves emotion reaching into the intellectual system and bringing about creative thoughts and ideas. That second side is hardest to pin down in the lab. But they believe it exists.

He also stated that if EI is like most other abilities, it is shaped partly by genetics and partly by environment. It is knowledge that can be taught, not the intelligence itself. Math intelligence cannot be taught to children because we do not make our kids derive algebra from basic principles. Instead we teach them about Math as we understand it. It is the same thing with emotional intelligence. We don't have to rediscover all the rules of emotion on our own –no one has enough intelligence to do that. Rather one can be taught what different feelings might mean and how they relate to oneself and others.

The popular presentation of EI is so different from research Mayer and Salovey have been doing. It is often defined as a list of traits such as optimism, persistence and warmth as Daniel Goleman describe in his best seller's book in 1995. Then, claims are made about how important those are. It can mislead the people who are going through any sort of EI program which is urging them to be as cheerful, happy and energetic as possible at work. No doubts that there are a few people who are going to be helped that way but it is coersive to dictate how people are supposed to feel at work or other places since these qualities are unrelated to many occupations.

As for the question whether or not for having the EI guarantee that ones are always in control of their own emotions. Mayer explained that EI is independent of emotional state. Everybody can be depressed and have high emotional intelligence, because evryone has a very good reason to be sad or depressed at some point or another. Given two people with one negative emotions, the person with EI will climb out of his or her funk over the long term, though it will not be necessarily quick or easy.

At present, there is disagreement about whether emotional intelligence is more an inherent potential, or whether it is a set of learned "abilities", "competencies", or "skills".As on the other hand, Daneil Goleman,Ph.D., a psychologist and former instructor of Harvard who based his definition of EI on Mayer and Salovey explained his concept on EI as :

Unlike IQ, which is basically the same through out life, or personality, which doesn't change, emotional intelligence-based competencies are learned abilities.

Another psychologist who has studied and kept track closely on the EI research and information is Steve Hein. He wrote several alternative definitions of EI as : 1) Knowing how you and others feel and what to do about it. 2) Knowing what feels good, what feels bad, and how to get from bad to good. 3) The emotional awareness, sensitivity and management skills which help us maximize our long term happiness and survival.

Hein listed specific "components" of EI, which he adapted from Mayer & Salovey's work as follows:

• Self –awareness. Being aware of your own emotions as they are occuring.

• Being emotionally literate. Being able to identify and label specific feelings in yourself and others; being able to discuss emotions and communicate clearly and directly.

• The ability to empathize with, feel compassion for, validate, motivate, inspire, encourage and soothe others.

• The ability to make intelligent decisions using a healthy balance of emotion and reason. Being neither too emotional nor too rational.

• The ability to manage and take responsibility for one's own emotions, especially the responsibility for self- motivation and personal happy. And based on his lists of components as shown above, Hein proposed his short and precised definition of EI as:

The combination of innate emotional sentivity and the healthy development thereof, which contribute to long term happiness and survival.

Anatomy of Emotional Brain

It is necessary for the ones who want to have insight understanding for EI . Daniel Goleman mentioned in his book , Emotional Intelligence (1955), that Paul Maclean, a neurologist, introduced the idea of the limbic system as the brain's emotional center more than 40 years ago. However, Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University was the first to discover the key role the amygdala in the emotional brain. His findings was revealed in his book "Sensory Systems and Emotion, Integrative Psychiatry, (1986)" and "Emotion and the Limbic System Concept, Concepts in Neuroscience, (1992).

LeDoux research (1992) is revolutionary for understanding emotional life because it is the first to work out neural pathways for feelings that bypass the neocortex. Those feelings that take the direct route through the amygdala include our most primitive and potent; this circuit does much to explain the power of emotion to overwhelm rationality.

LeDoux's work revealed how the architecture of the brain gives the amygdala a privileged position as an emotional sentinel, able to hijack the brain. His research has shown that sensory signals from eyes or ears travel first in the brain to the thalamus, and then –cross a single synapse-- to the amygdala; a second signal from the thalamus is routed to the neocortex --the thinking brain. This branching allows the amygdala to begin to respond before the neocortex, which mulls information to several levels of brain circuits before it fully perceives and finally initiates its more finely tailored response.

Other brain diagrams available at the limbic system and other articles on neurobiology of trauma and emotion

Amygdala : (Greeks –almond –shape) emotional brain

Thalamus : do the translation into the language of the brain

Neocortex/Cortex : thinking brain. Signals are put together into objects as we perceived them

Limbic System / brain: provide the appropriate response

Hippocampus : memory brain A visual signal first goes from the retina (eye or sometimes ear) to the thalamus where it is translated into the language of the brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed for meaning and appropriate response; if that response is emotional, a signal goes to the amygdala.

The discovery overthrows the notion that the amygdala must depend entirely on signals from the neocortex to formulate its emotional reactions. The amygdala can trigger an emotional response via this emergency route even as a parallel reverberating circuit begins between the amygdala and neocortex. The amygdala can have us spring to action while the slightly slow –but more fully informed-- neocortex unfols its more refined plan for reaction.

The amygdala can house memmories and response repertoires that we enact without quite realizing why we do so because the shortcut from thalamus to amygdala completely bypasses the neocortex. This bypass seems to allow the amygdala to be a repository for emotional impressions and memories that we have never known about in full awareness.

The hippocampus and the amygdala are the two key parts of memory brain. In memory the amygdala and hippocampus work hand-in- hand; each stores and retrieves its special information independently. While the hippocampus retrieves information , the amygdala determines if that information has any emotional valence. As LeDoux said " The hippocampus is crucial in recognizing the face as that of your cousin. But it is the amygdala that adds you don't really like her. However, it is mentioned that the amytdala, which matters very quickly in the infants' brain, is much closer to fully form of birth.

Research by LeDoux and other neuroscientists seems to suggest that the hippocampus is providing memory of context, vital for information meaning but the amygdala arousal will imprint in memory most. This means that, in effect, the brain has two memory systems, one for ordinary facts and one for emotionally charged ones.

Goleman stated that the emotions, then, matters for rationality. In the action of feeling and thought the emotional faculty guides our moment-to moment decisions. Working hand-in-hand with the rational mind, enabling –or disabling- thought itself. Likewise, the thinking brain plys an executive role in our emotions , except in those moments when emotions surge out of control and the emotional brain runs rampant.

In a sense we have two brains, two minds --and two different kinds of intelligence: rational and emotional. How we do in life is determined by both. It is not just IQ, but emotional intelligence that matters our life as well. Indeed, intellect cannot work at its best without emotional intelligence. Ordinarily, the complementarity of limbic system and neocortex, amygdala and prefrontal lobes, means each is a full partner in mental life. When these partners interact well, emotional intelligence rises --as does intellectual ability.

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