Another Kind of Intelligence
(Continued from previous page)

Fitness' example demonstrates Mayer and Salovey's ability approach to emotional intelligence. The ability to respond intelligently in such a situation--to recognize the complexity of one's emotional state and correctly identify the feelings involved, reason through several "if/then" scenarios based on possible emotional responses and make smart behavioral choices as a result of such abstract reasoning--requires sophisticated knowledge about how emotions work and play out over time.

Mayer and Salovey have always believed that they would be able to prove that emotional intelligence is a standard intelligence, related to cognition but separate. This is what is really revolutionary about their work, since our culture has been comfortable with the separation of head and heart for about 2,000 years. The Stoics of ancient Greece believed that emotions interfered with self-control, and both Judaism and early Christianity absorbed some aspects of their philosophy. Eighteenth-century romanticism was a reaction against this anti-emotionalist strain in western thought. In the late 19th century, Darwin argued that there were evolutionary bases for emotion across species, and studies of "social intelligence" were done by E.L. Thorndike in the 1920s. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, when psychologists began looking at the area of "cognition and affect"-- the interrelatedness of thoughts and emotions--that any focused work was done. And the idea that you can measure a person's emotional abilities in the same way that you can measure their intellectual abilities--Mayer and Salovey's claim--takes some getting used to.

When you measure intelligence you measure a person's ability to process information, reason abstractly and solve problems. Mayer and Salovey argue that emotional intelligence satisfies the criteria of a standard intelligence because emotions convey set meanings. "For example," Mayer says, "the experience of anger designates the presence of a real or perceived injustice or blockage of a desired goal. The experience of sadness indicates a real or perceived loss." Furthermore, he adds, "emotions develop in predictable patterns" that arise from complex social situations. "For example, if a person is happy and sad at the same time, only a limited class of events could have triggered such a reaction, and intelligence is necessary to track down the sort of event that brings such feelings about--say, a close friend finding a much-wanted job in a faraway city." Therefore, emotions, like cognition, contain a complex and consistent symbol system that "can be puzzled over, understood and planned for in abstract thought."

The way to measure any intelligence is to test for it, and there are currently several different tests for emotional intelligence in both the scientific and popular literature. However, the accuracy of the tests varies. Most popular tests rely on a self-report method that asks the test-taker to answer questions about his or her emotional make-up. The problem with self-report tests is that they measure the test-taker's assessment of his or her ability rather than the ability itself.

In the first comprehensive ability test that Mayer and Salovey developed--the MEIS (the Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale)--the test-taker is asked to answer questions about emotion for which there are right and wrong answers. Mayer and Salovey's model breaks emotional intelligence down into four branches: emotional perception, emotional facilitation of thought, emotional understanding and emotional management. Each branch is responsible for processing different forms of emotional information. Their test asks questions pertaining to each branch. "If one wants to understand how well people perceive emotion," Mayer explains, "we show them a sad face, for example, and see if they recognize the facial expression. Or, to understand how well they reason about emotions, we provide a question about emotions and assess the quality of their reasoning in response."

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