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Emotional intelligence - Part 2
4.0 Components of E.I.
Emotional intelligence (EI) is the area of cognitive ability involving traits and social skills that facilitate interpersonal behavior. There are two dimensions in emotional intelligence - one is interpersonal emotional intelligence and other is intrapersonal emotional intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence has five essential components prescribed by Goleman:
Self awareness: first crucial component is awareness of one's emotions. The ability to recognize and understand personal moods and emotions. It drives their effect on others. Hallmarks of self-awareness include self-confidence, realistic self-assessment, and a self-deprecating sense of humor.
Self regulation: managing one's emotions. The ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods, and the propensity to suspend judgment and to think before acting. Hallmarks include trustworthiness and integrity; comfort with ambiguity; and openness to change.
Empathy: knowing about other people's emotions (need to know different types of emotions). The ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people. A skill in treating people according to their emotional reactions. Hallmarks include expertise in building and retaining talent, cross-cultural sensitivity, and service to clients and customers. (In an educational context, empathy is often thought to include, or lead to, sympathy, which implies concern, or care or a wish to soften negative emotions or experiences in others).
Social skills: Proficiency in managing relationships and building networks, and an ability to find common ground and build rapport. Hallmarks of social skills include effectiveness in leading change, persuasiveness, and expertise building and leading teams.
Motivation: A passion to work for reasons that go beyond money and status. A propensity to pursue goals with energy and persistence. Hallmarks include a strong drive to achieve, optimism even in the face of failure, and organizational commitment.
More recently, Goleman favors only ‘Four Domains of EI’
Self-awareness: awareness of one's emotions (Emotional Self-Awareness. Accurate Self-Assessment and Self Confidence)
Self-management: managing one's emotions (Emotional Self-Control. Transparency (Trustworthiness). Adaptability. Achievement Orientation. Initiative. Optimism. Conscientiousness)
Social awareness: knowing about other people's emotions (need to know different types of emotions) (Empathy. Organizational Awareness. Service Orientation).
Relationship management: managing other's emotions. (Inspirational Leadership. Influence. Developing Others. Change Catalyst. Conflict Management. Building Bonds. Teamwork and Collaboration. Communication). Emotions should be managed in rational /intelligent manner.
Marshmallow experiment was done by a famous psychologist Walter Mischel to find out deferred gratification of people. In this experiment, 5 year children were given option of eating one marshmallow instantly but they will be 2 marshmallows if they will wait 15 minutes. Some waited for more time and they were found to be more successful in life.
Based on this experiment following characteristics of emotional intelligence person can be listed:
- Ability to delay satisfaction of desires/ delay in gratification important for emotional intelligence
- Aware of his awareness
- Handle stress/setback
- Positive attitude
- Resilient on the face of adversity
4.1 The Four Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence
The four branch model of emotional intelligence describes four areas of capacities or skills that collectively describe many of areas of emotional intelligence (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). More specifically, this model defines emotional intelligence as involving the abilities to:
- accurately perceive emotions in oneself and others
- use emotions to facilitate thinking
- understand emotional meanings, and
- manage emotions
4.1.1 Background
By the late 1980s, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, psychiatrists, computer scientists, and others, had identified a number of human capacities involved in identifying and understanding emotions. These human capacities -- involving emotional information processing -- had been examined in scores of research articles.
One means of organizing the many research contributions was to divide them into different areas according to the nature of the abilities they examined. In 1990, Salovey and I proposed that these abilities made up a unitary emotional intelligence. We further suggested that emotional intelligence (and the research that pertained to it) could be divided into three broad areas (and further sub-areas).
4.1.2 What Are the Four Branches
PERCEIVING EMOTION: The initial, most basic, area has to do with the nonverbal reception and expression of emotion. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have pointed out that emotional expression evolved in animal species as a form of crucial social communication. Facial expressions such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, were universally recognizable in human beings. Emotions researchers, evolutionary biologists, specialists in nonverbal behavior, and others, have made tremendous inroads into understanding how human beings recognize and express emotions. The capacity to accurately perceive emotions in the face or voice of others provides a crucial starting point for more advanced understanding of emotions.
USING EMOTIONS TO FACILITATE THOUGHT: The second area appeared every bit as basic as the first. This was the capacity of the emotions to enter into and guide the cognitive system and promote thinking. For example, cognitive scientists pointed out that emotions prioritize thinking. In other words: something we respond to emotionally, is something that grabs our attention. Having a good system of emotional input, therefore, should helped direct thinking toward matters that are truly important. As a second example, a number of researchers have suggested that emotions are important for certain kinds of creativity to emerge. For example, both mood swings, and positive moods, have been implicated in the capacity to carry out creative thought.
UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS: Emotions convey information: Happiness usually indicates a desire to join with other people; anger indicates a desire to attack or harm others; fear indicates a desire to escape, and so forth. Each emotion conveys its own pattern of possible messages, and actions associated with those messages. A message of anger, for example, may mean that the individual feels treated unfairly. The anger, in turn, might be associated with specific sets of possible actions: peacemaking, attacking, retribution and revenge-seeking, or withdrawal to seek calmness. Understanding emotional messages and the actions associated with them is one important aspect of this area of skill.
Once a person can identify such messages and potential actions, the capacity to reason with and about those emotional messages and actions becomes of importance as well. Fully understanding emotions, in other words, involves the comprehension of the meaning of emotions, coupled with the capacity to reason about those meanings. It is central to this group of emotionally intelligent skills.
MANAGING EMOTIONS: Finally, emotions often can be managed. A person needs to understand emotions convey information. To the extent that it is under voluntary control, a person may want to remain open to emotional signals so long as they are not too painful, and block out those that are overwhelming. In between, within the person's emotional comfort zone, it becomes possible to regulate and manage one's own and others' emotions so as to promote one's own and others' personal and social goals. The means and methods for emotional self-regulation has become a topic of increasing research in this decade.
Other comments on the Four Branch Model
The term, "branch," came into use in reference to the figures that presented the precursor and present models. Figures in both papers (1990 & 1997) contained lines that branched off from a central point. So, the term "branch" conveys no specific scientific meaning; calling the model a "four-area model" would have worked as well.
The branches are arranged from the areas most specifically related to the emotions-area (perceiving emotions) to the areas most general to personality (managing emotions).
Within each branch, skills can be identified that are early-developing (e.g., in childhood), and skills that await greater maturity.
This four-branch model represents what today has become called the ability model of emotional intelligence.
6.0 CRITICISMS OF E.I.
Cannot be recognized as form of intelligence: The essence of this criticism is that scientific inquiry depends on valid and consistent construct utilization, and that before the introduction of the term EI, psychologists had established theoretical distinctions between factors such as abilities and achievements, skills and habits, attitudes and values, and personality traits and emotional states. Thus, some scholars believe that the term EI merges and conflates such accepted concepts and definitions.
Has little predictive value: Studies conducted on EI have shown that it adds little or nothing to the explanation or prediction of some common outcomes (most notably academic and work success). Landy suggested that the reason why some studies have found a small increase in predictive validity is a methodological fallacy, namely, that alternative explanations have not been completely considered.
Ability model measures measure conformity, not ability: New research is surfacing that suggests that ability EI measures might be measuring personality in addition to general intelligence. These studies examined the multivariate effects of personality and intelligence on EI and also corrected estimates for measurement error (which is often not done in some validation studies).
Self-report measures are susceptible to faking: It has been suggested that responding in a desirable way is a response set, which is a situational and temporary response pattern. This is contrasted with a response style, which is a more long-term trait-like quality. Considering the contexts some self-report EI inventories are used in (e.g., employment settings), the problems of response sets in high-stakes scenarios become clear.
E.I. and job performance: Research of EI and job performance shows mixed results: a positive relation has been found in some of the studies, in others there was no relation or an inconsistent one. This led researchers Cote and Miners (2006) to offer a compensatory model between EI and IQ, that posits that the association between EI and job performance becomes more positive as cognitive intelligence decreases, an idea first proposed in the context of academic performance (Petrides, Frederickson, & Furnham, 2004). The results of the former study supported the compensatory model: employees with low IQ get higher task performance and organizational citizenship behavior directed at the organization, the higher their EI.
A meta-analytic review by Joseph and Newman also revealed that both Ability EI and Trait EI tend to predict job performance much better in jobs that require a high degree of emotional labor (where 'emotional labor' was defined as jobs that require the effective display of positive emotion). In contrast, EI shows little relationship to job performance in jobs that do not require emotional labor. In other words, emotional intelligence tends to predict job performance for emotional jobs only.
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