Emotional Intelligence Flashcards
What are the three elements of emotional intelligence?
- Monitor and discriminate between emotions
- Evaluate and regulate emotions
- Control over how emotions affect choices, actions, relationships
What is emotional awareness?
If we want to make the best use of the complex emotional responses that our species has evolved, it is in our interests to consciously experience, attend to and reflect upon our emotional responses. The first step to achieving this is being aware of your emotions.
Can you name the five levels of emotional awareness?
The model most often used in emotional awareness scales are:
(1) awareness of physical sensations,
(2) action tendencies,
(3) single emotions,
(4) blends of emotions, and
(5) blends of blends of emotional experience (the capacity to appreciate complexity in the experiences of self and other)
Describe the relationship between mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
Being able to separate emotions from who you are as well as the situation, which allows you to move past them. This gives you a greater sense of autonomy.
Mindfulness can also be helpful in dealing with unpleasant emotions. Meditation can help you to accept unpleasant emotions and with that responding appropriately and thoughtfully to them. It helps you to view your emotions as an observer, letting you accept all emotions, the good and bad. This is helpful in separating helpful from unhelpful emotions.
Are motivation and emotional intelligence linked? How?
The ability to regulate your emotions allows you to choose goals that are authentic to you and match your abilities. This can help you feel more competent in your life, leading to greater motivation.
List three ways in which your neurobiology affects how you engage emotionally with others.
- The amygdala is part of what is called the limbic system, a set of brain structures involved in emotion, memory, and behaviour. Your amygdala strongly responds to your negative emotions. Additionally, your amygdala is responsible for helping you interpret someone else’s emotions.
- When your orbitofrontal cortex is damaged, that causes impairments in your ability to understand what is socially acceptable.
- The superior temporal sulcus (STS), which is involved in identifying faces.
- Mirror neurons fire as if we were doing the thing we are watching. As we watch someone’s facial expressions this information is transferred to the limbic system (including the amygdala), which reproduces that emotion. This process allows us to interpret emotions, which is an important factor in our interpersonal competence and ability to empathize with others
What is the function of emotion?
We tend to think of emotions purely as “feelings”. But emotions actually involve a constellation of features: appraisal, readiness to think and act in certain ways, physiological changes, and social signals and dispositions – as well as feelings!
What is emotional regulation?
If you don’t regulate these negative emotions at all, your unconscious responses can take over your conscious life. The negative emotions can draw you into a narrowing, downward spiral. You can end up being scared when you should be brave. Having some strategies to regulate negative emotions is a part of being emotionally intelligent and can give you the power to use your emotional responses for your own purposes.
List the five elements of emotional regulation.
- Situation selection
- Modification of the situation
- Deployment of attention
- Change of cognition
- Modulation of response
Explain why suppressing your negative emotions is not a useful way of regulating emotion.
You can modulate your emotional responses either by suppression or by reappraisal. In suppression, you control your emotions by not expressing them (e.g. not showing embarrassment after failing a test). Reappraisal allows you to change your emotions by changing the way you think about the situation you find yourself in. While there is a place for both suppression and reappraisal, Gross and John (2002) have found that suppression consumes more cognitive resources and has little impact on negative emotional experience while decreasing positive emotional experience. Suppression leads us to share less of our positive and negative emotions, resulting in weakened social support and even causes people to like us less.
How does changing how you think about a situation change how you feel about a situation?
Reappraisal alters the experiential or physiological components of emotion by changing how we consciously think about them – the meaning we attach to them and our mindset towards them.
What are the upsides of feeling positive emotion?
The broadened attention and cognition triggered by positive emotion should facilitate coping with adversity, and improved coping should increase future experiences of positive emotion. As this cycle continues, people build their psychological resilience and enhance their emotional well-being.
