Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the processes involved in the recognition, use, understanding, and management of one's own and others' emotional states to solve emotion-laden problems and to regulate behavior. EI, in this tradition, refers to an individual's capacity to reason about emotions and to process emotional information to enhance reasoning. EI is a member of an emerging group of mental abilities alongside social, practical, and personal intelligences.

Research on EI is as an outgrowth of two areas of psychological investigation that emerged toward the end of the 20th century. In the 1980s, psychologists and cognitive scientists began to examine how emotion interacts with thinking and vice versa. For instance, researchers studied how mood states can assist and influence autobiographical memory and personal judgment. At the ...