Human Assets

Emotional Intelligence - Old Wine in New Bottles

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Two of the pioneers of the concept of Emotional Intelligence defined it as "the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one's thinking and actions" (Salovey and Mayer, 1990). Components of emotional intelligence include:

• Awareness and recognition of emotion in others
• Regulation of emotion in the self and others
• Use of emotion to facilitate performance

There has been intense media interest in emotional intelligence during the 1990s.  However, recent work by Australian and American researchers (Davies, Stankov and Roberts, 1998) suggests that the concept may not exist as a unique human ability in its own right.  Rather, it has been described as a new way of dressing up what is familiar - the concepts of personality and intelligence.  The article by Michaela Davies and her colleagues examines the evidence for this and ask what the implications are.

• Self-report - individuals rate how emotionally intelligent they are.
• Direct assessment - individual ratings on inventories are compared with others' ratings. These can include ratings of judgements of emotion in faces, colours and abstract designs.

However, the former has been criticised because the validity of people's assessments of how emotionally intelligent they are is questionable. Although objective measures avoid this problem, many do not stand their ground scientifically.  For the framework to exist, it must also be independent from parallel concepts, such as personality and intelligence. Recent research has also cast doubt on this.

Researchers have suggested that an emotion perception construct, rather than the broader emotional intelligence framework, exists.  To investigate this further, more reliable tests of emotion perception need to be developed.  The literature suggests that emotion perception is an interesting concept for two reasons.  First, it may provide a clue for reasons for the discrepancy between human behaviour under conditions of uncertainty and 'normative theory'; for example, for tasks that show bias in human reasoning. It could also be important in problem-solving situations, particularly in jobs requiring interaction with the public (e.g. sales, advertising or hospitality).

However, this is not to say that the emotional intelligence framework has nothing to offer. Over the last decade, the concept has been a catalyst for some very interesting work. In turn, this has raised interest in the notion of awareness of own and other' emotions in the workplace and has provided a popular turn of phrase for this aspect of interpersonal relationships.