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Text-only version for easy printing Another Kind of Intelligence What's Your Emotional IQ? By Anne Downey '95G Professor of psychology Jack Mayer has smiling eyes, a warm voice, and a bit of the absent-minded professor about him: he is loopy in a really smart sort of way. He is always ready to laugh, and he loves to tell stories. Right now, his mind is on Gordon Bower, a well-known cognitive psychologist at Stanford University with whom Mayer did his post-doctoral work. Bower's last group of graduate students are finishing their Ph.D.s, and Mayer is reminiscing. "Once I was delivering a lecture at a colloquium on some research I was doing," he says. "A visiting faculty member interrupted me and said, 'I don't understand why this work is of any consequence.' I gave my standard answer concerning the significance of the work and prepared to go on. The visitor, however, interrupted again and said, 'It just seems uninteresting to me.' Now, I stopped, stumped. As I was trying to think of what to say, a booming voice came from the back of the room--Gordon, of course. He's sometimes compared to John Wayne. 'Well, I think it is interesting.'" Mayer does a convincing impression of John Wayne at a psychology colloquium: macho, but with credibility. "And then Bower said to me, 'Proceed.' And, of course, I did." There are other reasons why Gordon Bower is on Mayer's mind. When you are a well-known psychologist, people read what you publish, and your credibility is always on the line. Mayer has cause to remember the pressure that Bower was always under because now it is his as well. "No matter where I try to tuck an article away, no matter how small or obscure the journal that publishes it, someone will dig it up. It's funny and strange," he says. It wasn't always this way. When he and his research partner, Peter Salovey, who is a professor at Yale, first began working on emotional intelligence in the late 1980s, their sense was that no one was paying much attention. The two met while Mayer was teaching at SUNY Purchase and Salovey was a graduate student at Yale. Both had a long-standing interest in how emotions and intelligence interact. As Mayer explains it, "We just thought that having the head and the heart continuously opposed was a very superficial idea." But their idea--that using emotions effectively constitutes an intelligence, one that can be proven empirically--was so radical that they were not entirely convinced of it themselves. "When we started publishing on emotional intelligence, we were kind of trying out the idea," Mayer says. They published their first two articles on emotional intelligence in 1990, and followed up with two or three more in the next couple of years. Their concept was cited in other social science literature perhaps four or five times before 1995, "and probably two or three of those times, we were the ones who cited it," Mayer jokes. Still, their early empirical studies suggested that emotional intelligence existed. Then Daniel Goleman came along. A science journalist trained as a psychologist, Goleman was working on a book that he was calling Social and Emotional Competence. He had read Mayer and Salovey's work and was adopting parts of their model, and he called to ask if he could use their term, "emotional intelligence," as his title instead. "There was no legal reason that he couldn't," Mayer says. "And I remember mentioning to a colleague that Dan Goleman was writing a book and wanted to use emotional intelligence as the title. She said, 'That name is bigger than you and Peter, and you just have to let it happen.'" Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, was a huge success and is still an international bestseller. The media pounced on the concept: Time magazine ran a cover story on it, and several other popular magazines included articles about it. "Emotional intelligence" soon became a catchphrase bandied about water coolers everywhere. (Goleman followed up with Working with Emotional Intelligence in 1998, and several other popular books and tests have been published as well). Mayer doesn't mind the attention being paid to his concept, except for one major problem: there are significant differences between the popular understanding of emotional intelligence and the scientific definition, differences that speak to the integrity of the concept itself. In fact, many scientists have dismissed the concept of emotional intelligence because books like Goleman's have merely duplicated already-existing studies of personality, adding little new to the field. Popular definitions of emotional intelligence recognize certain personality traits, such as persistence, motivation and drive for achievement, as important for success in life, and group them together under the heading of "emotional intelligence." However, Mayer says, these groupings are "haphazard," linking traits that have no relation to each other. "The reason we take issue with re-labeling parts of personality as 'emotional intelligence,'" Mayer explains, "is that if it doesn't refer exclusively to emotion or intelligence, it becomes quite unclear to what it does refer. Motivation, for example, is a mental function in many ways distinct from both emotions and cognition." Personality psychology studies hundreds of parts of the mind, systematically organizing and categorizing them according to their structures and functions. Therefore, Mayer argues, it is the discipline most qualified to define emotional intelligence. Mayer and Salovey have spent 10 years conceptualizing the abilities that make up emotional intelligence and creating methods for measuring them. The abilities include the ability to perceive and identify emotions, the ability to reason and solve problems based on emotional experience, and the ability to manage emotions effectively. Consider the following scenario, which comes from an article on emotional intelligence and marriage, written by Julie Fitness, and included in a collection entitled Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life, edited by Jack Mayer and his colleagues Joseph Ciarrochi and Joseph P. Forgas. At a dinner party, Jim overhears his wife, Susan, joking about his sexual hang-ups to friends. He feels "hot, sick, and has urges both to disappear under the table and to throw his dinner at her." Depending on his emotional intelligence, he may or may not understand that his feelings are a complex combination of embarrassment, shame, anger and hurt. The emotionally intelligent spouse, Fitness writes, might reason, "If I show I'm angry, then my friends will be even more embarrassed and I will look even more foolish. If I laughingly reveal one of my wife's anxieties, then my friends may assume it's all in fun, but she will know I've taken revenge. However, that will mean she has the right to be angry with me later and we'll get into a fight. If I pretend I haven't heard her remark, or I change the subject, then the situation should resolve itself for the time being and I can take it up with my wife when I feel calmer." When he confronts his wife later, Fitness writes, "The emotionally intelligent spouse may be aware that he still feels angry and that he would like nothing more than to attack his wife. However, he may also know that an angry reaction will escalate the conflict and prolong the drama for them both. Thus he may decide to control his anger, but to express his hurt and embarrassment. ... His wife may then feel guilty, apologize for having been so insensitive and try hard over the next few days to make him feel better." 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." In their article on emotional intelligence and the workplace (included in Mayer's collection on Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life), David Caruso, an intelligence researcher with a specialty in career development and his colleague Charles J. Wolfe provide a good example of how testing for emotional intelligence can be beneficial. Their client, Paul, is a research analyst at a securities firm who hates his job. Caruso and Wolfe use the MEIS (along with other information about job skills and personality traits), obtaining scores for each of the four branches in Mayer and Salovey's model and a total EI score. Here is what they find out about Paul and what they recommend to him: "Paul's MEIS results showed that he was okay at reading people, good at understanding others and managing emotions, but that he was brilliant at using emotions to think creatively. Here was a hidden asset, or ability, that was not being used in his job as an analyst. "After reviewing these results with Paul, we began to explore alternative career paths. Although he could adequately perform the analyst job, it was too narrow for him. In this case, it was the job, and not the person, that was at the root of the problem. Paul's skills--technical and emotional--could best be put to use in a broader, more creative role such as marketing. ... Five months after our last meeting, Paul called to say that he had taken a job as the director of marketing for a new company. ... Thrilled with the new job, he said that for the first time in his career he was being challenged and was having fun." This fall, a new version of the MEIS, the MSCEIT (the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test) will be published. "It is, without question, the best test that has been produced so far," Mayer says. "It has been very carefully produced, incorporating research going back 40 years." Mayer imagines that the test will be useful in many different areas, as a training tool for would-be psychotherapists, for example, or as a diagnostic tool in helping children with various emotional blindnesses. "But the test is important only because the concept is accurate," Mayer says. "The important point is the understanding that this intelligence exists." For Mayer, the interesting thing about emotional intelligence is that it changes our conception of what intelligence is. Just as IQ tests show a continuum of ability to reason abstractly in the cognitive sphere, emotional intelligence explains to us that there is also a continuum based on how adept someone is at abstract reasoning about emotions, and at understanding how emotions play out over time. "Emotional intelligence clarifies cognitive intelligence by saying that this kind of intelligence also exists," says Mayer. "It also constrains it to some extent by saying that cognitive intelligence is not the only brand of intelligence that exists." Mayer seems very comfortable with the long, strange trip that his theory has taken. "I'm not a natural optimist, but I've believed for a long time that the extraordinarily successful popularization of the concept isn't going to undo it, and that ultimately, it will help it. In the end, I hope that what will be said is that we have discovered a whole new intelligence." ~ Anne Downey '95G is a free-lance writer from Eliot, Maine. Return to photo version
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