A Background on Emotional Intelligence and IQ

A Background on Emotional Intelligence and IQ For many years lots of emphasis has been put on certain aspects of intelligence such as spatial skills, math skills, logical reasoning, verbal skills understanding analogies etc. Researchers were complicated by the fact that while IQ was able to predict academic performance to a significant degree and, in some way, personal and professional success, there was still something missing in the equation. Some of those people that they had fabulous IQ test results they did in life in a poor wayand someone is able to say that they were wasting their potential by thinking, communicating and behaving in a way that hindered their chances to succeed in their life later. Emotional intelligence (EI) in the other hand is the capacity, skill, ability or in the case of the trait emotional inteligence model it is a self-perceived ability which helps in order to control, access and identify the emotions of himself/herself, of others and of different groups. Many different structured models have been proposed to the scientific community but there is a great disagreement on how this term should be used. Despite these disagreements, which most of the times end to be technical, the trait emotional inteligence and ability emotional inteligence models, but not the mixed models, enjoy support in the literature and have successful applications in a variety of domains. The first roots of emotional intelligence we can say that it is Darwin’s work on the importance of second adaptation and the expression of the emotion for survival. Around the 20th century, although most of the traditional definitions of inteligence emphasized problem-solving and memory and generaly cognitive aspects, many influential researches in the intelligence field had shown how important are the non-cognitive aspects in the field of intelligence. In 1920 for example, E.L. Thorndike in order to describe the skill of understanding and managing other people he used the term social intelligence. In the same mann er, David Wechsler in 1940, described on intelligent behavior the influence that non-intellective factors have, and furthermore he argued that we should adequately describe these factors in order the models of intelligence to be complete. In the same manner Howard Gardner in 1983in his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences he was the first that introduced the idea of multiple intelligences which included both intrapersonal intelligence which isthe capacity to appreciate one’s feelings, motivations and fears and to understand oneself and interpersonal intelligence which is the capacity to perceive the motivations, desires and intentions of other people. On the other hand Gardner’s opinion was that IQ scores only are not able to explain one’s cognitive ability. Thus, although the names given to the concept had a wide variety, there was a common belief that traditional definitions of intelligence and IQ scores only were lacking in ability to ful ly explain the cognitive performance outcomes of a person. The first one who used the term â€Å"emotional intelligence† is usually attributed to the doctoral thesis of Wayne Payne, A Study of Emotion: Developing Emotional Intelligence which was made in 1985. However, prior to this, the term â€Å"emotional intelligence† had appeared in Greenspan in1989 and in Leuner in 1966 also put forward an EI model, followed by Mayer and Goleman, and Salovey.The distinction between ability emotional intelligence and trait emotional intelligence was introduced in the start of the 21st century.