Emotional Intelligence: Definition and a Brief History
The idea that we human beings have not only a quotient of cognitive intelligence, our so-called “IQ”, but also a level of emotional intelligence, called either “EQ” (for emotional quotient) or “EI” (emotional intelligence) has been emerging for at least 30 years (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2004b). It began to be popularised in the 1990s and is now in common parlance in many languages of the world; the term has been used by clerics in all the major religions (Goleman, 2005), as for many it is an intuitively appealing construct. But just what do we mean when we say that a person is, for example, an effective leader because they have “high emotional intelligence”? This blog post defines emotional intelligence and briefly explores its historic... »
