Week 3 Flashcards
What is emotional intelligence?
Ability to understand your own emotions and those of people around you.
Distinguish between different emotions
Use the information to guide your thinking and actions
What is emotional constancy?
Emotional competence refers to the essential social skills to recognise, interpret, and respond constructively to emotions in yourself and others. The term implies an ease around others and determines one’s ability to effectively and successfully lead and express.
This term has fallen out of favour in recent literature as it promotes a binary view, threshold for competency/incompetency.
What is emotional creativity?
Emotional creativity is defined as the ability to experience and express original, appropriate, and authentic combinations of emotions. Hence, a person with high EC will experience emotions that are more complex (Averill and Thomas-Knowles, 1991).
What is Alexithymia?
Alexithymia is a personal trait characterised by the subclinical inability to identify and describe emotions experienced by one’s self or others. The core characteristics of alexithymia are marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating.
What is empathy?
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Give a brief history of emotional intelligence
The term social intelligence was first used by Dewey and Lull , but the modern concept has its origins in E. L. Thorndike’s division of intelligence into three facets pertaining to the ability to understand and manage ideas (abstract intelligence), concrete objects (mechanical intelligence), and people (social intelligence). In Thorndike’s classic formulation: “By social intelligence is meant the ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls—to act wisely in human relations”. Similarly, Moss and Hunt defined social intelligence as the “ability to get along with others”. Vernon provided the most wide-ranging definition of social intelligence as the “ability to get along with people in general, social technique or ease in society, knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other members of a group, as well as insight into the temporary moods or underlying personality traits of strangers”.
By contrast, Wechsler gave scant attention to social intelligence in the development of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and similar instruments. He did acknowledge that the Picture Arrangement subtest of the WAIS might serve as a measure of social intelligence because it assesses the individual’s ability to comprehend social situations. In his view, however, “social intelligence is just general intelligence applied to social situations”. This dismissal was repeated in Matarazzo’s fifth and final edition of Wechsler’s monograph, in which social intelligence dropped out as an index term. David Wechsler suggests that affective components of intelligence may be essential to success in life.
“If you found a letter with an address and a stamp on it what would you do?” - question that falls under the verbal domain of Wechsler adult intelligence test. Intelligence is contingent on social domain and morality.
Intelligence itself often operates in a social domain.
Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1990) publish their landmark article, “Emotional Intelligence,” in the journal Imagination, Cognition, and Personality. Is intelligence an appropriate metaphor?
Distinguishing between personality traits and intelligence
Intelligence - involving a series of mental abilities
Traits - behavioural preferences as opposed to abilities
Knowing what a person fells was identified as a mental ability, as opposed to behavioural tendency.
If you have high emotional intelligence you will have an enhanced processing of emotion related information. Leads to a spectrum.
Outline Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1997) model of emotional intelligence
Mayer and Salovey have a 16 step developmental model of emotional intelligence from childhood to adulthood. It comprises four branches:
The ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately.
The ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking.
The ability to understand emotions, emotional language, and the signals conveyed by emotions.
The ability to manage emotions so as to attain specific goals.
There are then sub-groups of emotional intelligence skills in each of the branches.
- PERCEPTION, APPRAISAL AND EXPRESSION OF EMOTION
Ability to identify emotion in one’s physical states, feelings and thoughts.
Ability to identify emotions in other people, designs, artwork, etc., through language, sound appearance and behaviour.
Ability to express emotions accurately, and to express needs related to those feelings.
Ability to discriminate between accurate and inaccurate, or honest versus dishonest expressions of feeling. - EMOTIONAL FACILITATION OF THINKING
Emotions prioritise thinking by directing attention to important information.
Emotions are sufficiently vivid and available that they can be generated as aids to judgement and memory concerning feelings.
Emotional mood swings change the individual’s perspective from optimistic to pessimistic, encouraging consideration of multiple points of view.
Emotional states differentially encourage specific problems approaches such as when happiness facilitates inductive reasoning and creativity. - UNDERSTANDING AND ANALYSING EMOTIONS; EMPLOYING EMOTIONAL KNOWLEDGE
Ability to label emotions and recognise relations among the words and the emotions themselves, such as the relation between liking and loving.
Ability to interpret the meanings that emotions convey regarding relationships, such as that sadness often accompanies a loss.
Ability to understand complex feelings: simultaneous feelings of love and hate, or blends such as awe as a combination of fear and surprise.
Ability to recognise likely transitions among emotions, such as the transition from anger to satisfaction, or from anger to shame. - REFLECTIVE REGULATION OF EMOTIONS TO PROMOTE EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL GROWTH
Ability to stay open to feelings, both those that are pleasant and those that are unpleasant.
Ability to reflectively engage or detach from an emotion depending upon its judged informativeness or utility.
Ability to reflectively monitor emotions in relation to oneself and others, such as recognising how clear, typical, influential or reasonable they are.
Ability to manage emotion in oneself and others by moderating negative emotions and enhancing pleasant ones, without repressing or exaggerating information they may convey.
Outline deficits in perceiving emotions (facial emotion)
Deficits in social interactions are related to difficulties in processing facial emotions (and inaccurately interpreting the emotional state of others).
Implicated in depression, alcoholism, schizophrenia, autism, eating disorder etc.
What are Erkman’s six basic emotions?
Ekman’s most influential work revolved around the finding that certain emotions appeared to be universally recognised, even in cultures that were preliterate and could not have learned associations for facial expressions through media. Another classic study found that when participants contorted their facial muscles into distinct facial expressions (for example, disgust), they reported subjective and physiological experiences that matched the distinct facial expressions. Ekman’s facial-expression research examined six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Later in his career, Ekman theorised that other universal emotions may exist beyond these six.
Detail difficulties in perceiving facial emotion
Difficulties in facial emotion processing are specific
• E.g. bipolar patients overestimated the presence of anger in comparison to controls (McClure et al., 2003)
• Anxious individuals more likely to perceive negative emotions as threatening…but more attune to fear facial expressions (Surcellini et al., 2006).
• Pollak et al., (2000) Neglected children poor at recognising & distinguishing between emotional expressions (3-5yrs). 2 groups (neglected and physically abused) name emotion and whether emotion was same or different between the photos
• Physically abused children showed a response bias to angry faces - quicker and thought more were angry than there were.
Outline Goleman’s original theory of EI
- Linking emotional intelligence to brain function and regions.
- Limbic system - involved in the experience of emotions
- Amygdala: fight-or-flight
- Emotional intelligence is the development of our ability to control basic emotions such as fight or flight.
Hierarchy of emotional intelligence 1-5, reaching next stage is contingent on competency at previous stage
What are the Five components of emotional intelligence according to the original theory of (Goleman, 1995)
- Identify one’s own emotional states (self-awareness)
- Managing and controlling one’s emotions (self-regulation)
- Emotional states related to a drive for achievement
(motivation) - Assess and influence other’s emotions (empathy)
- Ability to sustain good interpersonal relationships (social skills)
