Issue #26: Emotional Intelligence Explained
Learn about what EQ is, which elements it consists of and how to improve it
Dear mental health advocate,
I hope the year has started out well for you! I am celebrating my first full year at Substack, a milestone that I am quite happy with. It was not always easy, but luckily I received a lot of good feedback from you. As you might have noticed, I am experimenting with sending out these newsletters at different times (now on Mondays) to check if more people enjoy reading it during the week instead of in the weekend.
So, without much further ado: a new premium edition of The Present Psychologist Paper. In this issue I will discuss a lot of things related to our emotional intelligence (EQ). For example, I will explain what it is, which elements it consists of and also how you can improve it. Hope you find it useful!
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Emotional Intelligence Explained
A lot of times people have discussed the importance of someone’s IQ (intelligence quotient). There seems to be a lot of emphasis on it, especially during a person’s formative years and educational career. Yes, IQ can play a big role in your life. But this does not mean it defines who you are or indicates how worthy of a person you are. Everyone gets to contribute to life and society in their own way. I have a wish that in our educational system we could focus more on other types of intelligence or other traits that would be good to develop. I know that humankind is an intelligent species and intelligence has brought us a lot. But there is more than this that we would need to focus on.
Another typical trait that many psychologists are interested in discusses another kind of intelligence: emotional intelligence. How we manage our emotions, how aware we are of them but also how we recognize these in others and can react to them. Mental health professionals have also tried to figure out how emotional intelligence plays a role in being neurodivergent or certain disorders. Understanding emotions and dealing with them can be very complex and many people struggle with this. So, I thought it would be useful to help you understand how psychologists believe emotional intelligence works.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Although the term already originated in 1964, a psychologist named Daniel Goleman was the first to really shed light on emotional intelligence in his best selling book of the same name in 1995. Others soon assisted with expanding the theory and concept of it by doing all sorts of studies on EQ. For example, in the psychology field up until then most research was focused on the relationship between our behavior and our emotions. But then, psychologists and neurologists started to investigate which brain areas are actually involved when certain emotions arise. A few of these results from these studies are these:
Frontal brain structures are mostly associated with expressing your emotions, while the posterior cerebral structures on the right half of your brain is more involved with perceiving emotions.
If your frontal lobe is damaged, then you could either become way more emotional or less than before.
Certain hormone levels have been found to impact how intense a specific emotion can be felt or perceived.
Our brain seems to have both a pleasure center and a pain center.
You might think, how does this relate to emotional intelligence? Well, because scientists found certain areas in our brain linked to how we process emotions and that both mental and emotional intelligence use similar brain areas. This means that our intelligence not only consists of mental, but also emotional components. Ultimately, this has led psychologists to define emotional intelligence as follows:
“Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control, evaluate, and use emotions to communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively”.
The five elements of emotional intelligence
Based on Daniel Goleman’s input on emotional intelligence, a model has been defined which claims EQ consists of five distinct elements and components. These separate parts seem to relate to the Big Five of personality, which I will explain more in-depth below:
Self-awareness. This is is the ability to measure and understand your own emotions well enough. If you have high self-awareness, you should be able to place your emotions in a certain context and monitor them. People who score high on extroversion, introversion and openness to experience are often better at self-awareness.
Self-management. Knowing how to manage your feelings and how to incorporate them in your daily life is considered self-management. This means that if you score high on this, you do not easily let emotions disrupt you. Such people often score low on neuroticism and are considered stable
Self-motivation. The ability to use your emotions to your advantage and turn them into life goals and action. If you score high on self-motivation, it is easy for you to work on the things you want. A high score also means that you are a conscientious person.
Other-awareness. Understanding and recognizing other people’s emotions is an important part of emotional intelligence. People who score high on this often have a good sense of empathy and score high as well on agreeableness and openness.
Relationship management. This is a social ability that gives people the opportunity to interact with other people and maintain good relationships. People that score high on relationship management are often more extroverted and agreeable.
What are signs of high emotional intelligence?
If you have a high EQ, then it is likely you will show some (or most) of the following signs:
Acceptance of yourself and of other people for who they are and how they express themselves.
Being able to let go of grudges, issues and problems in relationships as you understand the other person’s perspective better or because you want to rise above.
Being able to understand your own feelings and those of other people, while also being capable of experiencing empathy for someone else.
Being able to manage your emotions in all sorts of situations, but especially difficult ones.
Being able to pinpoint and describe specific moods, emotions and feelings.
Having a strong sense of imagination, curiosity and willingness to interact with other people.
How to improve your emotional intelligence
As a psychologist, I am still convinced that the awareness of emotions, the ability to cope and understand feelings are just as important as being intelligent. I would even go as far as saying emotional intelligence is maybe even more valuable in some situations. Granted, not everyone is capable of developing a high EQ and in no way meant as a judgment or stigmatization. More that training your EQ should be seen as valuable time investment, just like studying for an exam or getting a degree. Some people are more in touch with their emotions from the get go, while others require a bit more effort to get to the same level. In this article I want to provide you with some guidelines and advice how to improve your emotional intelligence:
Increase self-awareness. To understand your emotions, it is vital to become aware of them. Introspect and take time to reflect to really notice what you are feeling. Once you are aware of your core emotions, try to accept the existence of them and put in effort to be okay with them.
Practice self-management. When we suffer from stress, our emotions overwhelm us quickly and makes it harder to deal with them. Once we learn how to manage stress and take a step back to prioritize our tasks, it becomes easier to balance feelings as we have more time to process them.
Increase social awareness. Taking the time to live in the moment, learning mindfulness and meditation techniques can help clear your head. This will have the side effect that you have more space and mind power to pick up other people’s emotions.
Invest in relationship management. If you surround yourself with people and ensure you work together with them you will learn more about humans and their emotions instead of avoiding them. Conflicts, nonverbal cues and group dynamics can teach you a lot about what people are feeling and how they react.
Join the 31-Day New Year Challenge!
I have partnered up with online platform OPEN, which is a great way to do daily meditations and breathwork exercises to ground yourself. According to Fortune, OPEN is “The best place online to practice breathwork, meditation, yoga, and pilates whenever and wherever.”
This year, you can join for free to do a 31 day new year challenge. Each day a new meditation or exercise under 10 minutes to be in the present moment. I love doing such exercises myself, because it helps to feel calmer and sleep better. If you are interested, you can sign up below. You can cancel at any time.
Help me raise awareness 💌
My name is Alf Lokkertsen and I am a psychologist and writer, creating mental health content for you. My passion is to raise awareness about topics related to psychology, as it has helped me greatly in my personal life. I strongly believe that many problems could be avoided or dealt with better if everyone had some in-depth psychology knowledge.
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