The concept of emotional intelligence (EI) is an integral part of all areas of human development. However, as with many other scientific ideas, scientists still cannot agree on what emotional intelligence is. There are many definitions of emotional intelligence. Some define emotional intelligence as a set of non-cognitive abilities, competencies, and skills that affect a person’s ability to cope with challenges and environmental pressure. Others see this as the ability to be aware of their emotions and the emotions of others in order to motivate themselves and others and to manage emotions well in private with themselves and when interacting with others. Since the trainer is more a practitioner than a scientist, a shorter definition is preferred, which is easier to work with during the training and which conveys the essence of this scientific concept. Emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of one’s emotions and the feelings of another, the ability to control one’s emotions, and the psychological tendencies of others and builds the interaction on this basis.
The main personal benefit of high emotional intelligence is the ability to understand people without any verbal communication. People also prefer to talk about emotional competence rather than emotional intelligence. High emotional intelligence in itself may not be a reliable predictor of success in work. However, it serves as the basis for the competencies that are necessary for success. It is important to justify the use of the concept of “emotional intelligence.” People are talking about the ability to recognize, understand, and evoke feelings and emotions, which can quite be attributed to intellectual activity. On the other hand, emotional reactions are no less important for a person’s adaptation than mental activity.
Although the emotional and rational have certain similarities, it is possible to determine the differences between them by their manifestations in the character of an adult, in which a sensible and emotional assessment of the situation is often not only different but contradictory. Thus, the main professional advantage of having high emotional intelligence is understanding hindrances in the work environment. People can talk about the fact that in mind, there is an interpenetration of the emotional and rational as two principles of the intellectual. In various sources, emotional intelligence is not translated the same way. Along with the main, the following translation options will be used: irrational thinking, emotional sensitivity, emotional consciousness, emotional potential.
Developing Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is a stable mental ability, part of an extensive class of cognitive skills; in particular, EI can be considered as a substructure of social intelligence. As a mental ability, it is also part of a larger group of personality traits. This is one of many factors of personality, rather positive than negative for interpersonal interaction. The multiplicity of theories of EI does not allow people to create a holistic picture of this construct in the structure of the personality and its relationships with other mental processes and properties.
Therefore, research is relevant that allows individuals to identify mental properties that cause individual differences in understanding and managing emotions. The factors that determine the level of EI are extroversion and neuroticism – the main basic measurements of individual differences in the personality sphere of a person largely inherited and biologically determined. They determine the characteristics of the emotional area and different strategies for interacting with the world, thereby learning the level of EI. The data indicate that emotionally stable people, unlike emotionally unstable people, have high intrapersonal and interpersonal EI, and also better understand and manage their own and others’ emotions. Thus, it clear that EI plays an essential role in both the development and ontology of a person.
Emotional intelligence can be developed to a certain extent, but some parts of it are hereditary. Considering that EI is the ability to recognize and identify emotions, understand the causes that caused a feeling and the consequences it will lead to, control the intensity of emotions, external expression and evoke an arbitrarily necessary emotion. It is understandable that emotionally stable people outperform emotionally unstable ones in terms of the above actions.
This is probably due to such characteristics of emotionally unstable people as pessimism, gloom, and depression. It does not allow them to correctly recognize and identify emotions since, in general, they all contain a negative connotation. The tendency to react too emotionally to the excitement and having difficulty returning to a normal state does not allow controlling the manifestation of emotions and arbitrarily provoking or changing them. Thus, extroverts are superior to introverts in understanding and managing the feelings of other people and have a higher interpersonal EI, and introverts, in turn, have higher levels of expression control. Emotionally stable people, in contrast to emotionally unstable people, have high intrapersonal and interpersonal EI, better understand and manage their own and others’ emotions.
Usually, a person does not think about the role of hope in his or her life; he or she just lives. The problem arises when he or she is faced with difficult life situations that cause difficult crisis experiences. In general, actualizing attitudes towards hope, barriers, and obstacles to achieving the goal, which necessitates overcoming them, play an important role. At an empirical level, emotional intelligence is the ability to control one’s own emotions and the emotions of another person. It can be observed and recorded that some people control emotions better than others. There are two types of EI theories in the literature – mixed models and ability models. Mixed models explain this skill by a complex of cognitive abilities and personality traits, and ability models by a combination of cognitive abilities. Moreover, each of the theoretical approaches uses its method for diagnosing EI. Representatives of ability models offer tests consisting of tasks that have correct and erroneous answers.
Importance of Emotional Intelligence
Traditionally, in psychology, following the founders of the domestic concept of relations, attitude is regarded as the psychological connection of a person with the world of things and people around it. It is the driving force of an individual, forming an integrated system of three interconnected components: attitude to oneself, attitude to others, attitude to objects, and the phenomena of the outside world. The outlook is an essential system of individual, selective, conscious connections of a person with various aspects of reality, stemming from the entire history of a person’s development, expressing his or her personal experience, internally determining his or her actions and experiences. In the context of this study, the provision of the determination of personal relationships by life experience is of particular importance. Attitude to hope is a private component of the personality relationship system, which, according to the concept, is an internalized experience of existence in a social environment. Thus, by the attitude to hope, it is possible to understand the subjective – selective, to some extent, the conscious perception of hope, which includes the conative, cognitive, and emotional – evaluative components.
Moreover, in a certain social context, hope for the subject appears as endowed with meaning for the issue and is presented in his or her mind as an idea of the sense of confidence in the life of the subject. Attitude to hope is the result of a certain life path of a person and is formed under the influence of life events, a person’s relationship to his or her life, under the control of established attitudes to various time periods of life, his or her assessments and perceptions of his or her past, present and future. The peculiarity of the attitude towards hope lies in its sociocultural conditioning. Hope is always a certain totality of human relations – relations to the world, to oneself, to other people, to life in general. The attitude to hope is formed, actualized in a person as a result of re-living and living through significant life events, as a result of comprehension and re-sedition of his or her life path. Based on this understanding of the attitude towards hope, currently, existing quantitative methods for measuring hope and hopelessness become inapplicable and inadequate to the objectives of the study.
In contrast with IQ, EI can be more critical in determining a person’s success due to the fact that modern age technology can outsource almost all calculative and measurement tasks. However, it is difficult to mimic EI in machines because it requires a sophisticated understanding of various cues. If the content of the models is compared, then it can be seen that intrapersonal intelligence coincides with self-awareness, such subtypes of EI as adaptability, stress management, general mood are part of self-control. Mixed EI models face a number of difficulties, and the use of EI questionnaires is based on the erroneous assumption that people are able to give accurate self-report about their abilities. On the other hand, numerous data show that EI questionnaires practically do not correlate with scores of intellectual tests. This raises the question of whether they measure something related to intelligence. At the same time, EI questionnaires at a high level correlate with personality traits. This is due to the fact that these questionnaires include constructs that are measured by existing personal methods.
Consequently, EI questionnaires measure some combination of personality traits. If the content of each of the branches of the model is analyzed, it becomes obvious that the ability to trigger emotions to enhance thinking is one of the options for controlling emotions, the transition of emotions from one stage to another also depends on the ability to manage emotions, and complex emotions are felt in the terminology of psychology. This model can be improved as follows: recognition of emotions, understanding the causes of emotions, and managing emotions.
Management includes the challenge and preservation of emotions, as well as the transfer of one emotional state to another, which is required when establishing interpersonal relationships and in the field of persuasion. The main problem of EI tests is related to determining the method of scoring or, in other words, which answer option is considered correct and on what basis. The first method of calculation is based on the consensus of the sample: each answer is assigned a score corresponding to the proportion of subjects who chose this answer. This way of counting can simply express perceptions or even prejudices about emotions. The second method refers to expert assessments, and the score is attributed to the proportion of experts who noted this answer. In this case, it is not entirely clear by what criterion to select experts. The problem is not in the method of scoring but in the tasks that are offered in the EI test. For example, to diagnose the ability to identify emotions, subjects are provided landscapes and abstract figures, for the diagnosis of facilitating thinking, they are asked to compare feelings with other sensory stimuli, etc. Such tasks are projective in nature and cannot have the correct answers a priori.
Improving the EI test is seen in the following areas. First, in the diagnosis of recognition of emotions, a circle of emotions must be defined that a person must be able to identify. Intercultural experiments show seven universal emotional manifestations on a person’s face – this is anger, fear, sadness, joy, surprise, disgust, contempt. These emotions were the basis of the methodology for the diagnosis of recognition of emotions by facial expression. Secondly, when diagnosing an understanding of the causes, the emphasis should not be on the event that caused the emotional reaction but on how this event was evaluated and what motive underlies human behavior. Thirdly, in the diagnosis of emotion control, scenarios should be offered in which the subject was given the task to call, save, transfer from one state to another a certain circle of emotions.
Personality and emotional intelligence are rightfully considered key concepts in psychology. At the same time, the study of EI is one of the most important and difficult tasks of psychological science. Interest in emotional intelligence has always accompanied and stimulated the development of psychology. Scientists sought to understand the essence of EI to reveal its mental structure. In this regard, theories of personality and EI began to be actively developed. No method of emotional intelligence can do without the concept of its structure. The presence of a formed structural idea serves as the main sign of the development of any EI theory. That is why, speaking about personality and EI, the emphasis, first of all, should be on its structure.
An experimental study of emotional intelligence structure in both domestic and foreign psychology began relatively recently. To date, the number of theories is incomparably ahead of the number of systematic studies of personality structure. In this regard, questions of the scientific organization and conduct of such studies are becoming more and more relevant. At the present stage of the development of psychological knowledge, the questions of the correlation and age dynamics of the relationships of achievement motivation, temperament, and cognitive styles in the EI structure remain insufficiently studied. The available data are contradictory. Therefore, there is no need to talk about any single consistency of opinions of theorists and practitioners.
The concept of emotional intelligence is perhaps the only theory in management based on neurophysiology. Science readily explains how the amygdala, which is the emotional center of the brain, affects the activity of the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for logical thinking. The theory of emotional intelligence stunned businesspeople, refuting one of the main ideas of success in the twentieth century. The most effective in their activities are people who combine mind and feelings. It is people with high emotional intelligence who make better decisions, act more effectively in critical situations, and better manage their subordinates, which, accordingly, contributes to their growth in the ranks. It must be recognized that the topic of emotions is far from new in the scientific world. This is primarily due to the fact that on the basis of traditional intelligence tests (IQ), it turned out to be impossible to predict the success of the activity. In addition, in recent years, companies have been paying increasing attention to managing intangible assets along with tangible ones. In this context, emotions are seen as part of the organization’s intellectual capital.
First of all, the answer lies, in fact, namely in the combination of the words “emotional” and “intelligence.” In business, the rational and effective spheres of activity have traditionally been divided. However, “emotional intelligence” is not an oxymoron. It implies both the ability to immerse oneself in his or her emotions in order to realize and feel them and the need for a rational analysis of emotions and decision making based on this analysis. Emotions carry a huge layer of information, using which people can act much more effectively. The identification of motivation, temperament and cognitive styles in the structure of personality was justified by many famous psychologists. Despite the huge number of individual studies of achievement motivation, attitude, and cognitive techniques, questions about their relationship and its age dynamics in the personality structure remain insufficiently theoretically and empirically worked out. Even in those few cases where attempts are made to theoretically substantiate and interpret the alleged connections, the empirical requirements of their verification and evidence are often overlooked.