Emotional Intelligence

Introduction

In a 1961 book of literary criticism, Van Ghent noted that certain characters within Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice possessed ‘emotional intelligence’ (EI) in comparison with others (1961: 103). She referred to EI as ‘… emotionally informed intelligence – or shall we say, that intelligence which informs the emotions …’ (Van Ghent, 1961: 107). At roughly the same time, the term EI began to appear in psychological and medical articles, dissertations, and within books. The term was typically mentioned in passing, and not described or explained in any formal sense. Still, the term ‘emotional intelligence’ was too intriguing to disappear while, at the same time, too self-contradictory to be clearly useful as a scientific concept.

In 1990, two articles were published that first employed the EI ...