Emotional Health

It’s not strange that the term Emotional Intelligence is growing popular nowadays. It is being talked about a lot by many people. Are you or are you not “smart” about your emotions? This is the curious question for all of us. Usually, we don’t even know how to be with our emotions, how to reflect.

It all began about 2,000 years ago when Plato wrote, “All learning has an emotional base.” Many years have passed since we proved that the motional intelligence really exists and helps us to understand ourselves even better.

In 1985 a graduate student at an alternative liberal arts college in the USA wrote a doctoral dissertation, which included the term “emotional intelligence” in the title. This seems to be the first academic use of the term “emotional intelligence”

Then, in 1990, the work of two American university professors, John Mayer and Peter Salovey, was published in two academic journal articles. Mayer, (U. of New Hampshire), and Salovey (Yale), were trying to develop a way of scientifically measuring the difference between people’s ability in the area of emotions. They found that some people were better than others at things like identifying their own feelings, identifying the feelings of others, and solving problems involving emotional issues. John Mayer and Peter Salovey developed their ability theory and the four-branch model according to which the emotional intelligence is divided into:

I. Emotional Perception and Expression

II. Emotional Facilitation of thought

III. Emotional Understanding

IV. Emotional Management

“The first branch means recognizing all the verbal and non-verbal information from the emotion system. The second branch concerns emotional facilitation of cognitive activities. It refers to using emotions as a part of cognitive processes such as creativity and problem solving. The third branch involves cognitive processing of emotion, meaning insight and knowledge brought to bear upon ones feelings and the feelings of others. Emotional Management evolves the regulation of feelings in oneself and the feelings of others.” (Snyder, Shane & Lopez, 2005, pp, 2-5)

Peter Salovey (Yale University’s Psychology Department Chair) states, “Where intelligence was once perfection, people were recognizing that there was more to life. Where emotion was once perdition, people were recognizing that it might have substantive value.” Since 1990 these professors have developed two tests to attempt the measure what they are calling our “emotional intelligence.” Because nearly all of their writing has been done in the academic community, their names and their actual