Emotional Intelligence For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Investigating the Science Behind Emotional Intelligence

In This Chapter

• Distinguishing EQ from IQ

• Seeing how emotional intelligence can affect your performance

• Understanding the importance of emotional intelligence

• Knowing the difference between personality and emotional skills

In psychology (like other sciences), every once in a while someone discovers something new. This discovery then goes through a scientific process that uses the experimental method, which means that the discovery gets looked at again and again in carefully controlled studies, and other researchers replicate (repeat) the results.

In order for the psychological community to recognize emotional intelligence (EI) as a real phenomena, it had to go through the experimental method. Although the science of emotional intelligence represents a very recent area of research, the field has grown rapidly from one published scientific paper in 1990 to over 1,650 publications today.

In this chapter, I show you why emotional intelligence is important and how you can tell the difference between it and other psychological concepts, such as cognitive intelligence (IQ) and personality. I show you how to recognize the difference between emotional skills, personality, and cognitive intelligence so that you know what you can change and what you can't. The good news about emotional intelligence, unlike IQ and personality, is that you can change it through the right kind of training or coaching. In this chapter, I also show you ...