Sunday, July 25, 2010

Emotional Intelligence

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence describes the ability, capacity, skill or, a self-perceived grand ability to identify, assess, manage and control the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups.

Emotional Intelligence embraces two aspects of intelligence:

· Understanding yourself, your goals, intentions, responses, behaviour and all.

· Understanding others, and their feelings.

Emotional Intelligence includes four types of abilities:

1. Perceiving emotions – the ability to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts—including the ability to identify one's own emotions. Perceiving emotions represents a basic aspect of emotional intelligence, as it makes all other processing of emotional information possible.

2. Using emotions – the ability to harness emotions to facilitate various cognitive activities, such as thinking and problem solving. The emotionally intelligent person can capitalize fully upon his or her changing moods in order to best fit the task at hand.

3. Understanding emotions – the ability to comprehend emotion language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. For example, understanding emotions encompasses the ability to be sensitive to slight variations between emotions, and the ability to recognize and describe how emotions evolve over time.

4. Managing emotions – the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and in others. Therefore, the emotionally intelligent person can harness emotions, even negative ones, and manage them to achieve intended goals.

The five domains of Emotional Intelligence:

  1. Knowing your emotions
  2. Managing your own emotions
  3. Motivating yourself
  4. Recognizing and understanding other people's emotions
  5. Managing relationships, E.g. managing the emotions of others

Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognize the meanings of emotion and theirrelationships, and to reason and problem-solve on the basis of them. Emotional intelligence is involved in the capacity to perceive emotions, assimilate emotion-related feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage them.

The high EI individual, most centrally, can better perceive emotions, use them in thought, understand their meanings, and manage emotions, than others. Solving emotional problems likely requires less cognitive effort for this individual. The person also tends to be somewhat higher in verbal, social, and other intelligences, particularly if the individual scored higher in the understanding emotions portion of EI. The individual tends to be more open and agreeable than others. The high EI person is drawn to occupations involving social interactions such as teaching and counselling more so than to occupations involving clerical or administrative tasks.

The high EI individual, relative to others, is less apt to engage in problem behaviors, and avoids self-destructive, negative behaviours such as smoking, excessive drinking, drug abuse, or violent episodes with others. The high EI person is more likely to have possessions of sentimental attachment around the home and to have more positive social interactions, particularly if the individual scored highly on emotional management. Such individuals may also be more adept at describing motivational goals, aims, and missions.

Different EI in people

Some of us accomplish certain tasks with great ease and sophistication; others of us simply can't do those tasks. This is the case with most challenges we face in life. Some of us are great chess players while others of us have trouble just figuring out how the pieces move. Some of us are fabulous conversationalists, while others of us have trouble just saying hello.

Emotional intelligence is an intelligence having to do with discerning and understanding emotional information. Emotional information is all around us. Emotions communicate basic feeling states from one individual to another -- they signal urgent messages such as "let's get together" or "I am hurting" or "I'm going to hurt you."

We all need emotional intelligence to help us through our emotionally demanding days. Even if we are not emotionally intelligent ourselves, we may rely on those higher in emotional intelligence to guide us.

EI are particularly good at establishing positive social relationships with others, and avoiding conflicts, fights, and other social altercations. They're particularly good at understanding psychologically healthy living and avoiding such problems as drugs and drug abuse. It seems likely that such individuals, by providing coaching advice to others, and by directly involving themselves in certain situations, assist other individuals and groups of people to live together with greater harmony and satisfaction.

Measuring Emotional Intelligence

Some people ask whether emotional intelligence should be measured at all. Often, people who take this position equate emotional intelligence with maintaining a sense of sensitivity and respect toward humanity. The idea of assigning a number to a person's quality and particularly an emotion-related quality such as emotional intelligence seems highly problematic.

The counter-argument to this begins with the idea that self knowledge is a core human value. The importance of self-knowledge has been recognized by both Western and Eastern philosophers since antiquity.

One contemporary contribution to self-understanding that arises from psychological research is that it is very difficult for people to understand themselves without some kind of independent feedback.

Changing Emotional Intelligence

Some people may ask that “Is it possible for someone to increase his or her emotional knowledge?” and “Is it possible for someone to improve their social and emotional functioning?” In both cases, the answer is almost certainly yes.

First of all, it would be surprising if people could not learn something about emotions and emotional behaviour. People are very good at learning, and emotions are fairly well understood. There is nothing mysterious about how to teach information about emotions.

Many educational curricula exist concerning teaching social and emotional effectiveness. In addition, some curricula can be focused on emotional learning in particular. Teaching emotional knowledge and teaching social and emotional functioning are somewhat different.

Therefore, I agree that Emotional Intelligence is very important to everyone and with a good Emotional Intelligence, everybody can work well together and the world will have peace. In addition, I suggest that peoples should work on managing their emotions and this will definitely help them to move on to a greater path in their life.

By: Winston

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

http://www.businessballs.com/eq.htm

http://www.unh.edu/emotional_intelligence/index.html

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