Emotional Intelligence

96 flashcards by MentisLibrary

What the research actually supports: the competing models, self-awareness and regulation, reading and responding to others, empathy against sympathy, conflict, feedback, and where the popular claims outrun the evidence.

Who introduced the term emotional intelligence, and who made it famous?
Peter Salovey and John Mayer defined it in a 1990 academic paper. Daniel Goleman's 1995 book brought it to a general audience and shaped the popular version.
What is the ability model of emotional intelligence?
Mayer and Salovey's four branch model: perceiving emotions, using emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding emotions, and managing emotions.
What are Goleman's five components of emotional intelligence?
Self awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill.
What is the difference between ability and trait emotional intelligence?
Ability emotional intelligence is measured with performance tests that have better and worse answers. Trait emotional intelligence is measured by self report and sits closer to personality.
What is the MSCEIT?
The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, a performance based measure that scores answers about emotional problems against expert and consensus judgments.
What does the research actually support about emotional intelligence and job performance?
There is a real but modest relationship, and part of it overlaps with general intelligence and personality traits, particularly conscientiousness and agreeableness. It matters more in jobs with heavy emotional demands.
What is emotional labor?
The work of managing your own emotional display as part of a job, such as staying warm with a hostile customer. Arlie Hochschild introduced the term.
What is the difference between surface acting and deep acting?
Surface acting is displaying an emotion you do not feel. Deep acting is changing how you actually feel so the display becomes genuine. Surface acting is more strongly linked to exhaustion.
What is alexithymia?
Difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotions, along with a tendency to focus on physical sensations rather than feelings. It exists on a spectrum.
Can emotional intelligence be improved?
The skill components can. Emotion labeling, reappraisal, perspective taking and listening all improve with deliberate practice. Broad personality traits move much less.
Is emotional intelligence always used for good?
No. The same abilities, reading emotions accurately and shaping them, can be used to manipulate. Skill and motive are separate.
What is the Johari window?
A model dividing self knowledge into four regions: open, known to you and others; blind, known to others but not you; hidden, known to you but not others; and unknown to both.
What is the difference between internal and external self awareness?
Internal self awareness is understanding your own values, reactions and effect on yourself. External self awareness is knowing accurately how others see you. Research by Tasha Eurich found the two do not correlate.
Why is asking what better than asking why in self reflection?
Why questions tend to produce plausible stories and self justification. What questions produce observations you can act on.
What is an emotional trigger?
A specific cue, often a word, tone, situation or role, that reliably produces a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the present event.
What are the body's early warning signs of a strong emotion?
Changes you can notice before the feeling has a name: heart rate, jaw and shoulder tension, shallow breathing, heat in the face, tightness in the chest or stomach.
What is interoception?
The perception of internal bodily signals such as heartbeat, breathing, hunger and muscle tension. Accurate interoception supports recognizing your own emotions.
What is emotional granularity?
The ability to distinguish emotional states finely, such as separating frustration, disappointment and resentment rather than lumping them into feeling bad. Lisa Feldman Barrett's research links higher granularity to better regulation.
What are the emotions usually called basic?
Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, from Paul Ekman's cross cultural work on facial expressions.
What is each basic emotion for?
Fear signals threat and prepares avoidance. Anger signals a blocked goal or a violation and prepares confrontation. Sadness signals loss and prompts withdrawal and support seeking. Disgust signals contamination. Surprise interrupts attention.
What is the difference between an emotion and a mood?
An emotion is short lived and has an object: you are angry about something. A mood is longer, more diffuse, and often has no identifiable cause.
What are primary and secondary emotions?
A primary emotion is the first, direct response. A secondary emotion is a reaction to that first feeling, and it often masks it.
What is affect labeling?
Putting a feeling into words. Studies of affect labeling by Matthew Lieberman and colleagues found that naming an emotion is associated with reduced activity in threat related brain regions.
What is emotional contagion?
The tendency to catch emotions from others through expression, tone and posture, usually without either person noticing.
What is the caveat about the facial feedback hypothesis?
The claim that forcing a facial expression changes what you feel had a famous early study that a large multi laboratory replication failed to reproduce. Any effect is smaller and less certain than the popular version suggests.
What is the difference between guilt and shame?
Guilt is about a behavior: I did something bad. Shame is about the self: I am bad. Research associates guilt with repair and shame with concealment and defensiveness.
What is rumination and how does it differ from reflection?
Rumination is repetitive, passive dwelling on distress and its causes. Reflection is directed at understanding and deciding. Rumination predicts worse mood and no better solutions.
What is emotional suppression, and what does it cost?
Deliberately hiding the outward signs of a feeling you are having. Research by James Gross and colleagues finds it does not reduce the internal experience, impairs memory for the situation, and raises physiological arousal.
What is cognitive reappraisal?
Changing how you interpret a situation in order to change the emotion it produces. It generally works better than suppression and does not carry the same costs.
What are the five stages of Gross's process model of emotion regulation?
Situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation. The earlier you intervene, the cheaper regulation is.