Emotional Intelligence, Families

Emotional intelligence is a multifaceted term that is used to describe an individual’s ability to base their judgment and guide their thinking and behaviors on their emotions. A measurement of how an individual recognizes their emotions, emotional intelligence also is reflective of how an individual identifies other people’s emotions. An additional component of emotional intelligence is the individual’s ability to register and understand conflicting emotions, such as feeling excited and scared at the same time. The ability to differentiate and label various emotions appropriately demonstrates the intersection of the cognitive and emotional systems. These systems create the entirety of emotional intelligence.

Initially introduced in the early 1960s, the term emotional intelligence gained more currency during the 1980s when research identified emotional intelligence as a construct that ...