Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to reason with, and about, emotions. This is the ability model of emotional intelligence developed by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990. However, since that time, emotional intelligence has come to mean many different things to both the public and to researchers. Some popular approaches to emotional intelligence (also referred to as EQ, for emotional quotient) view emotional intelligence as a set of personality traits or as a set of traditional leadership competencies. The result has been a good deal of confusion, as models and assessments that have little or no basis in either emotions or intelligence employ the EI or EQ terminology. Emotional intelligence defined as traits or competencies does not appear to offer anything new, whereas EI defined as an ability may or may not represent a new construct.

The term emotional intelligence had been used in an unsystematic way in the 1980s and earlier, but it became widely known in 1995 through the publication of a trade book titled Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, written by Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and science writer for the New York Times. The book became a best-selling publication. It described a loose collection of skills and traits as emotional intelligence, thus permitting a wide range of preexisting models, assessments, and approaches to be relabeled to include the term emotional intelligence. Even researchers began to base their work on this trade book, rather than examining the intelligence-based roots of the construct.