Emotional Health

It's not strange that the term Emotional Intelligence is growing popular nowadays. It is being talked about a lot by many people. Are you or are you not "smart" about your emotions? This is the curious question for all of us. Usually, we don't even know how to be with our emotions, how to reflect.

It all began about 2,000 years ago when Plato wrote, "All learning has an emotional base." Many years have passed since we proved that the motional intelligence really exists and helps us to understand ourselves even better.

In 1985 a graduate student at an alternative liberal arts college in the USA wrote a doctoral dissertation, which included the term "emotional intelligence" in the title. This seems to be the first academic use of the term "emotional intelligence"

Then, in 1990, the work of two American university professors, John Mayer and Peter Salovey, was published in two academic journal articles. Mayer, (U. of New Hampshire), and Salovey (Yale), were trying to develop a way of scientifically measuring the difference between people's ability in the area of emotions. They found that some people were better than others at things like identifying their own feelings, identifying the feelings of others, and solving problems involving emotional issues. John Mayer and Peter Salovey developed their ability theory and the four-branch model according to which the emotional intelligence is divided into:

I. Emotional Perception and Expression

II. Emotional Facilitation of thought

III. Emotional Understanding

IV. Emotional Management

"The first branch means recognizing all the verbal and non-verbal information from the emotion system. The second branch concerns emotional facilitation of cognitive activities. It refers to using emotions as a part of cognitive processes such as creativity and problem solving. The third branch involves cognitive processing of emotion, meaning insight and knowledge brought to bear upon ones feelings and the feelings of others. Emotional Management evolves the regulation of feelings in oneself and the feelings of others." (Snyder, Shane & Lopez, 2005, pp, 2-5)

Peter Salovey (Yale University's Psychology Department Chair) states, "Where intelligence was once perfection, people were recognizing that there was more to life. Where emotion was once perdition, people were recognizing that it might have substantive value." Since 1990 these professors have developed two tests to attempt the measure what they are calling our "emotional intelligence." Because nearly all of their writing has been done in the academic community, their names and their actual research findings are not widely known.

Instead, the person most commonly associated with the term emotional intelligence is actually a New York writer named Daniel Goleman. Goleman had been writing articles for the magazine Popular Psychology and then later for the New York Times newspaper. Around 1994 and early 1995 he was evidently planning to write a book about "emotional literacy."

"Emotional intelligence represents the ability to perceive, appraise, and express emotion accurately and adaptively; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate cognitive activities and adaptive action; and the ability to regulate emotions in oneself and others. In other words, emotional intelligence is the ability to process emotion-laden information competently and to use it to guide it cognitive activities like problem solving and to focus energy on required behaviors." (Mayer, Salovey, 1997, pp. 3-31)

Daniel Goleman defines EI as "The ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one's thinking and actions". This relatively new idea is a departure from the traditional attitude, still prevalent in many school settings, that intelligence can be divided into the verbal and non-verbal (performance) types.

"All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for life that evolution has instilled in us. The very root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb 'to move', plus the prefix 'e" to connote 'move away', suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit in every emotion. That emotions lead to actions is most obvious in watching animals or children. It is only in 'civilized' adults we often find the anomaly in the animals kingdom, emotions - root impulses to act - divorced from obvious reactions." (Goleman, 1995, p.6)

If someone says to you, "You're too reactive", what does that mean? In relation to what or to whom? Aren't they usually talking about themselves? Usually they mean "You're more reactive than I am" or "You're more reactive than I'd like you to be." They may be the kind of person who could have a firecracker go off next to them and not "react," but what does that mean in relation to their ability to function and relate? Not much!

And then the next day you'll have a pounding headache, or have been up all night with the baby, and fail to respond immediately to a comment someone makes and they'll say, "Why don't you respond? You just sit there."

One standard would certainly be how well things are going for you at work and at home, because our EQ is more important to our happiness, success and health than our IQ. The people I've worked with in Emotional Intelligence take to it immediately. There are immediate applications to their life they try, and the results are positive, so there's an excellent and immediate feedback loop that keeps you motivated and improving.

One of the best things about it is that you learn the tools, and then the applications are all around you. No matter what situation you're in, or what circumstance, increasing your Emotional Intelligence skills will help. You'll become more aware of what's going on around you - the things you couldn't quit "grasp" before. You'll also become far more knowledgeable about what's going on with other people, and isn't that always the most difficult thing to figure out?

One of the Emotional Intelligence competencies is emotional expression. It's important to understand that 90% or more of any person's emotional expression takes place nonverbally. That means that you need to learn how to interpret nonverbal behavior. I mean the expression on the person's face, how they sit, how they walk,