Researchers at Yale and elsewhere argue that emotional development gauges aptitude better than standard IQ tests.

Intelligence Redefined

by Jay Dixit

“Why is it,” wondered Peter Salovey, “that some of the smartest people we know are so stupid?” At the time, Salovey, Yale professor of psychology, was painting his house with the help of his friend John Mayer, a fellow psychologist with training in the field of intelligence.

In the ensuing conversation, the two men noted that academia seemed to be a haven for bright but socially unskilled people. They challenged each other to define “charisma.” Why was it, they asked themselves, that so many academics seemed to have so little of it?

By the same token, they acknowledged, there were other people who seemed especially skilled at putting people at ease-those to whom one revealed one’s deepest secrets. Why were some people so naturally easy to talk to that they made social interactions seem effortless?

As a leader in the study of emotion, Salovey proposed that a large part of charisma might involve a set of emotion-related skills: being able to understand and express one’s own emotions, being able to read nonverbal cues in others, being able to calm people down or cheer them up, and using emotions to gain new perspectives on solving problems or to enhance one’s creativity.

Referring to his own area of expertise, Mayer offered his opinion: such a set of skills could constitute a certain kind of intelligence that couldn’t be measured by an IQ test.

Their conversation resulted in the 1990 publication of a paper entitled “Emotional Intelligence,” in which the two authors proposed a framework for thinking about emotion-related skills as a form of intelligence.

When it was first published, the paper attracted little attention outside the scientific community. But with the recent release of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, a New York Times science writer, emotional intelligence has landed at the center of a storm of controversy about what is means to be smart. Already, the book is number five on the bestseller list. The cover story of the October 2 issue of Time magazine proclaims that “emotional intelligence may be the best predictor of success in life.” Even President Clinton is talking about it. During a recent campaign, Clinton’s motorcade made an unscheduled visit to the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver. “I’ll tell you what’s a great book,” he told reports, “this Emotional Intelligence. It’s a very interesting book. I love it. Hillary gave it to me.”

According to Goleman’s book, “Emotional intelligence is basically a different way of being smart.” It involves a set of skills that Salovey and Mayer proposed, along with some additions. What’s more, Goleman claims that emotional intelligence skills are much better predictors of a person’s future success than the skills traditionally measured by IQ.

This, of course, is not a new idea. We recognize the concepts underlying emotional intelligence concept when we use words like “nerd” and “geek” to describe people who may have book smarts, but are socially inept. Conversely, we call people “charismatic,” “popular,” or “charming,” if we find that they have the set of people skills we deem important.

But somehow that conventional wisdom has gone ignored in modern psychological circles. Peter Salovey thinks that we owe our neglect of emotions to the fact that “the last 2000 years of Western thought have always pitted passion against reason.” Emotions have traditionally been thought of as disruptions that should be minimized and regulated because they disturb the thought process.

Whatever the reason, emotions are seldom mentioned in connection with intelligence. Indeed, traditional intelligence researchers continue to be openly hostile to the idea that emotions constitute a part of intelligence. As a result, the idea that we possess an emotional intelligence is nothing short of revolutionary.

Part of the reason for the controversy lies in the media’s portrayal of emotional intelligence. The cover of Time, for instance, tantalizes readers with the question, “What’s your EQ?” But according to Salovey, “There is no EQ. There’s no EQ test. We would never argue that there is one, or that a single EQ is even a measurable construct.” The test printed in Time under the heading “One Way to Test Your EQ” is actually a test of optimism.

Emotional Intelligence deliberately places itself in the midst of an already heated debate over intelligence. Goleman goes so far as to quote Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray, whose book The Bell Curve corroborates Goleman’s thesis, that “the link between test scores and… achievements is dwarfed by the totality of other characteristics.”

So why this talk about feelings all of a sudden? Goleman writes that he had a very good reason for bringing this up when he did. All around us, he writes, in our cities, in our communities, in our schools and on our streets, things are getting worse. In his preface, Goleman presents a compendium of some of the more disturbing stories in the newspaper that week. A nine-year-old’s temper tantrum that turns into a rampage, a shoving match in a crowd that ends in a shooting, statistics about parents murdering their children, a neo-Nazi on trial for burning five women to death. What’s the common thread here? “The news,” Goleman writes, “simply reflects back to us on a larger scale a creeping sense of emotions out of control in our own lives and in the people around us.”

Many of these problems, Goleman argues, have their root cause in the “surging rage and despair” that is the result of poor management of emotional lives. “This book,” he writes, “is a guide to making sense of the senselessness.”

Goleman’s definition of emotional intelligence lends itself to theories of behavior modification. Unlike the IQ test, which attempts to rate the purely genetic component of intelligence, emotional intelligence incorporates social influences. The solution, Goleman says, is to teach it to our children in schools.

The Social Development Program, headquartered at Hillhouse High School, is taught in every New Haven public school at each grade level from kindergarten through senior high. Institute in 1988, the program aims to combat the growing problems of violence and HIV.

Tim Shriver, former supervisor of the Social Development Program, claims that, although the program does not use the term emotional intelligence, “If you look at the examples, we’re really talking about the same thing.” Point for point, the Social Development Program teaches the skills that Goleman advocates in his book.

The first skill of emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and articulate one’s own feelings. This is taught starting in kindergarten, where children learn to give “I messages”-statements that begin with “I feel.” Training in using the vocabulary of feelings continues in various forms through the sixth grade. By learning to verbalize feelings in this way, children master the first skill of EQ.

A second important skill is empathy. Mickey Kavanagh, one of the SDP’s facilitators, calls this “knowing what it’s like on the other side.” Empathy is practiced in the fourth and fifth grades in games such as “Making Faces,” in which one player receives a card with a “feelings word” and mimes it, charades-style. The other students are then challenged to read his facial expressions and body language to guess what feeling is being represented. The idea is that in a crisis situation, if each child is able to tell how the other is feeling and to understand the other’s situation, they will be more likely to resolve the conflict peacefully.

Goleman’s third skill is motivation-what he calls “maintaining hope and optimism in the face of setback and adversity.” Students are taught motivation through a six-step process that includes “say the problem and how you feel,” “set a positive goal,” “think of lots of solutions,” and finally, “go ahead and try the best plan.” Children are also taught how to administer “warm fuzzies”-a sure way to cheer up their classmates.

The last skill-and according to Goleman the most important-is impulse control, which is drilled into students early and often. A poster hanging in a classroom depicts a stoplight and reads: “Stop calm down, and think before you act.” The hope is that students will learn to think through their actions, rather than letter their anger move them to do something rash. Ideally, when confronted with a real-life situation, students will have already internalized the steps to a non-violent solution, and will be able to resolve the conflict peacefully.

The program has seen real results. There has been a decline in the number of 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds who report having had sexual intercourse, as well as a decrease in the number of situations in which children report that they would fight.

Personal testimonials abound: tales of parents getting along better with their children; a story about a sixth-grader who prevented her best friend’s suicide by soliciting the help of a Social Development teacher; a student who is certain she would have ended up an unwed, pregnant teenager is she hadn’t been taught to stand up for her rights in her Social Development class.

“I think the results are pretty close to spectacular,” says Shriver. “Fighting is down, suspensions are down, safety is better, hopefulness is up. Children have a sense of the future.”

Although the Social Development Program appears to be addressing the same themes as emotional intelligence, Goleman can’t claim credit for its success. The program was developed by former Yale professor Roger Weissberg, in collaboration with educators, but independently of Salovey and emotional intelligence researchers. “I think it’s a happy accident, frankly,” Goleman says. “The fact that it was independently discovered by the program’s developers gives me more faith in its intrinsic success. It suggests that there is a common core of competencies which act as a buffer or inoculation for a child facing perils like drug abuse or violence or dropping out.”

Salovey objects to this thought process. “The press on this over the past two weeks, in part encouraged by the Goleman book, implies that this is the answer to social problems-this is the answer to teenage pregnancy; this is the answer to drug use; this is the answer to drop-outs; this is the answer to unemployment; this is the answer to dying prematurely.” The danger here, Salovey argues, is in blaming the victim-in saying, “If only you were smarter about your emotions, this wouldn’t have happened to you.” The problem with that, Salovey says, is that it takes social problems and implies that they have individual solutions. “The idea that it's going to save the world from all these social ills, I think, is the wrong level of analysis.”

Of course, no one can deny that a program that teaches children to be better problem-solvers, to negotiate difficult interpersonal situations, or, as Salovey puts it, “basicall to learn how to share the basketball rather than punch the other guy and take it” is useful. Goleman’s book will increase public awareness about the potential effectiveness of such programs.

“I think the critical thing to recognize here is that we’re doing incremental work,” Shriver said. “You don’t expect kids to come in as if they just mastered long division and say, ‘aha, I can do it.’ What you’re likely to find is a lot of small steps that result in a bigger picture that says that we as communities, schools, families are working better together.”

What’s the next step in emotional intelligence research? For starters, earlier this year the Yale Child Study Center established CASEL, the Collaborative for the Advancement of Emotional and Social Learning, to promote courses that teach these kinds of skills to children.

Meanwhile, Peter Salovey is working on a book of his own. Says Salovey, “I was going to call it something like Emotional Competency and Emotional Literacy, but now I’m thinking of calling it Emotional Competency and Emotional Intelligence.” He laughs. “Why should Dan Goleman be the only one who gets to use emotional intelligence in the title of his book?”