Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence

Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the
right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way—this is not
easy.
Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics

Head Heart
Rational, logical Emotional, affective
Neocortex Limbic System
Hippocampus Amygdala

Thinking Feeling

IQ EQ

Goleman cites a “massive survey” that shows a worldwide

trend for the present generation of children to be more
troubled emotionally than the last: more lonely and depressed,
more angry and unruly, more nervous, and prone to worry,
more impulsive and aggressive. His theme in the book: how
can we bring intelligence to our emotions—and civility to our
streets and caring to our communal life?

Emotional Quotient is measured by the skill level of the

following personal and social competencies:

 Self-restraint
 Self-control
 Zeal, Persistence
 Self-motivating
 Compassion, Empathy

Chapter One: What Are Emotions For?

Example of altruistic love that overrides the impulse for personal
survival: saving CP daughter, sacrificing life

Emotions guide us in facing predicaments too important to leave to

intellect alone: danger, loss, persisting towards goal, bonding with
others, building a family

A view of human nature that ignores the power of emotions is sadly

shortsighted.

Has passion ever overwhelmed reason?—give personal examples.

Laws are meant to civilize us, to domesticate emotional life, to subdue

and harness emotional excess (Freud)

Emotion: “to move away”; implicit: emotions are catalysts for action

Note emotions: anger, fear, happiness, love, surprise, disgust, sadness:

all prepare the body for specific responses. (See Appendix A of the text
for details on the seven basic emotions.)

Emotion is biological; expression of emotion is cultural.

Our two minds: the one that thinks and the one that feels; “exquisitely
coordinated” most often; when does the balance tip one way or the other?

Review Appendix B: Hallmarks of the Emotional Mind: the research of

Ekman and Epstein reviewed

The characteristics of the emotional mind

 Quick, instantaneous, without cognitive input

 Strong certainty in action

 Radar for danger; capable of reading emotional reality

 Full emotional heat is very brief; compare to mood states

 Slow, following cognition, with complicated situations

 Childlike: categorical thinking; personalization; self-

confirming
  Self-justifying: emotions come with a set of perceptions and
“proofs” that does not value logic and reason; therefore the
rationalization
 Reacts to the present as though it were the past: strongly or
subtly
 State specific: each feeling has its own distinct repertoire of
thought and behaviors. Aren’t your thoughts and behaviors
different depending on the emotion that is present?
Examples?

Review the development of the three brains: reptilian brain, old

mammalian brain and the new mammalian brain, or brainstem, limbic
system and neocortex.

The emotional areas of the brain are intertwined via myriad connecting
circuits to all parts of the neocortex. Why is that significant?

Chapter Two: Anatomy of an Emotional Hijacking

Emotional explosions, losing it, snapping—all behaviors that are later

judged to be inappropriate, exaggerated and regretful.

Emotional responses precede rational responses when the stimulus is

directed to amygdala (“the seat of all passion”) prior to its going to the
neocortex area. “Anatomically the emotional system can act
independently of the neocortex”

The amygdala is the brain’s alarm system, sending messages to all parts
of the brain and activating the brain’s fight or flight response,
redirecting blood flow to muscles, increases the adrenaline to increase
sensitivity of senses, raises heart rate, slows breathing

The brain has two memories: the hippocampus remembers facts; the
amygdala attaches emotions to those facts. Flashbulb memories: those
that have such a strong emotional component that details of the memory
are easy to recall.
Evidence for the unconscious mind: amygdala is a repository for
emotional impressions and memories that we have never known about
in full awareness.

Out of date neural alarms: explains PTSD; our emotional reactions to

similar stimuli are exaggerated and unfounded; i.e., a Vietnam vet
hitting the sidewalk at the sound of a car’s backfiring.

Confirmation of Freud: the interactions of life’s earliest years lay down

a set of emotional lesions based on the attunement and upsets in the
contacts between infant and caregivers: “wordless blueprints for
emotional life” may be the result of the amygdala, which matures faster
than the hippocampus.

Precognitive emotion: a reaction based on neural bits integrated into a

recognizable object. A whole perception may be formed wholly on the
basis of only some parts. Provide an example.

The brain’s damper switch for the amygdala’s surges appears to lie at
the other end of a major circuit to the neocortex in the prefrontal lobes
just behind the forehead. The neocortex brings a more analytical and
appropriate response to our emotional impulses, modulating the
amygdala and other limbic regions.

Right lobe: fear, aggression

Left lobe: inhibits the right lobe; the key “off” switch for distressing
emotions.

Neuropsychological testing of boys who were doing poorly in school, but

with above average IQs, revealed that there was less activity in the
frontal cortex. Their behaviors included impulsivity, anxiety,
disruption, poor emotional control.

Premise: intellect cannot work at its best without emotional

intelligence; our work is to harmonize head and heart. So, how are you
doing with that?
Chapter Three: When Smart Is Dumb

How can a really intelligent high school kid stab a physics teacher with a
knife? Is there such a thing as temporary insanity?

EQ defined:
 Motivating self

 Persisting in the face of frustrations

 Controlling impulse

 Delaying gratification

 Regulating moods

 Keeping distress from overwhelming the ability to think

 Empathizing and optimistic

Emotional aptitude (character) is a meta-ability, determining how well

we use other skills we have, such as intellect

The Vailliant longitudinal study at Harvard: men with the highest IQs
in college were not particularly successful compared to their lower
scoring peers in terms of salary, status or productivity, life satisfaction
or happiness with friendships, family and romantic relationships.

Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind, 1983, (and “guiding visionary

behind Tuft University’s Project Spectrum”) proposed multiple
intelligences: verbal, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical,
interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic

Interpersonal Intelligence: leadership, ability to nurture relationships

and keep friends, ability to resolve conflicts, skill at social analysis

Intrapersonal Intelligence: ability to understand self and use that

model to operate effectively in life; emotionally tuning in to yourself;
essential for interpersonal intelligence

Review of behaviorism and cognitive theory and the paucity of

acknowledgment of the value of emotions in understanding behavior.

Our humanity is most evident in our feelings

Synonyms of EQ: social intelligence, personal intelligence

Thorndike: social intelligence is both distinct from academic abilities

and a key part of what makes people do well in the practicalities of life.

Peter Salovey, Yale University, studies social intelligence and notes five
domains:

 Self-awareness
 Managing emotions, handling feelings
 Motivating oneself, self-directing
 Empathy and altruism
 Handling relationships to support popularity, leadership
and interpersonal effectiveness

Jack Block, UC-Berkley, examines his concept of ego resilience, a

synonym for EQ, with four domains:

 Emotional regulation
 Adaptive impulsive control
 Sense of self-efficacy
 Social intelligence

Block’s research notes high IQ pure types vs. high EQ pure types:

High IQ Pure Type: Male

 Ambitious, productive, predictable, dogged

 Untroubled by concerns about himself

 Critical and condescending

 Fastidious and inhibited

 Uneasy with sexuality and intimacy

 Unexpressive and detached

 Emotionally bland and cold

High IQ Pure Type: Female

 Introspective

 Prone to anxiety, rumination, guilt

 Hesitant to express anger directly

High EQ Type: Male and Female

  Socially poised, outgoing, cheerful
 Not prone to fearfulness or rumination
 Capacity for commitment to people/causes
 Responsible, ethical
 Sympathetic and caring in relationships
 Rich emotional life
 Comfortable with self and others and world
 Assertive
 Express feelings directly
 Playful, spontaneous, open to sensual experiences
 Rarely feel anxiety or guilt

Block asserts that pure types are extreme and that all of us mix both IQ
and EQ in varying degrees.

Chapter Four: Know Thyself

Metacognition: our own awareness of our thought processes; an ability

to think about out own cognitive abilities

Metamood: an ability to understand our own emotions

Freud’s similar concept: “an evenly hovering attention”; an interested

yet unreactive witness; observing ego; “a neutral mode that maintains
self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions; a slight stepping
back from experience

Mayer’s styles for attending to and dealing with emotions

 Self-awareness: these people are psychologically healthy,

optimistic, sophisticated about their emotional lives,

autonomous and sure of their own boundaries; bad moods
don’t stay around long
 Engulfed: swamped by their emotions and helpless to

escape from them; mercurial personalities, unaware of

feelings so they are lost in them; little control over
emotional life; overwhelmed and emotionally out of control
 Accepting: accepting of emotions and don’t try to change

them; those who are in a good mood with no reason to

change and those who are susceptible to bad ones but don’t
change them: a laissez-faire attitude; resigned or helpless
How would you react in an airplane during turbulence? Would you be
vigilant or would you tune out your surroundings?

Sensitizers: those who tune in and amplify their own reactions

Repressors: those who distract themselves and minimize the experience of

their emotional response

Extreme cases noted by Diener: college student and the woman who
lost her pen. Diener finds that women, in general, feel both positive
and negative emotions more strongly than do men.

ALEXITHYMIA: lacking words for feelings; inability to express

emotions; utterly lacking in the fundamental skill of emotional
intelligence, self-awareness

Is it possible to have no inner emotional life at all?

SOMATIZATION: mistaking an emotional ache for a physical one;

notable in Asian populations in therapy

Theory related to alexithymia: disconnect between limbic system and

neocortex

Case Study: Elliot’s tumor and removal that caused emotional blunting
or alexithymia; unable to assign values to decisions

The key to sounder personal decision-making: being attuned to our

feelings; valuing gut feelings

Two levels of emotion: conscious, registering in the cortex; unconscious,

registering in the amygdala

Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental

of emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood
Chapter Five: Passion’s Slave

Sophrosyne: care and intelligence in conducting one’s life; a tempered

balance and wisdom (Greek)

Temperantia: temperance, the restraining of emotional excess

(Catholic)

Managing our emotions is a full-time job.

We have some say in how long an emotion will last

How successful are you at escaping foul moods?

ANGER is the mood people are worst at controlling, and some think
that it shouldn’t be controlled since to be angry is ventilation and
catharsis.

Anger builds on anger, often pushing one into an emotional hijacking

Controlling anger can come with understanding or reframing an

incident and cooling down by waiting out the adrenal surge in a safe
place, a time out. Leaving the scene is sometimes a good idea.

Anger Management techniques by Tice

 Going off to be alone while cooling down

 Active exercise

 Deep breathing and muscle relaxation

 Distraction

 Thought stopping and disputation

Refuting catharsis: giving vent to anger did nothing to dispel it; outrage
pumps up the brain’s arousal. Leaving one feeling more angry, not less

Anger: don’t suppress it, but don’t act on it. Cool down and address the
issue constructively

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (the worrier) has all the attributes of a

low-grade emotional hijacking:
  Comes from nowhere
 Uncontrollable
 Steady hum of anxiety
 Impervious to reason
 Locks the worrier into a single, inflexible view of the
worrisome topic

Anxiety has two components: cognitive and somatic

Managing low-grade anxiety: self-awareness, relaxation, challenging

thoughts, medication

Managing sadness: bereavement is useful and should be experienced as

a time out to contemplate loss and adjust and move on. Sadness and
depression can be managed by
 Socializing, going out to eat, to a movie or ballgame

 Recognizing and resisting rumination

 Aerobic exercise

 Lifts to self-image: getting a massage

 Engineering a small success: clean the closets, wash the car

 Cognitive reframing: seeing it differently

 Praying or meditating

Therapy for depression: just do it even if you don’t feel like it; make a
special effort to divert attention towards pleasant things

ECT: may work because it affects STM and the patients don’t
remember why they are depressed

REPRESSORS: those who blot emotional disturbances from their

awareness; tuning out emotional upset; the unflappable ones

About one in six people are unflappable. They may come to be that way
with an innate temperament, modeling by unflappable parents, a
reaction to a chaotic family life, i.e. the alcoholic parent

Any repressors in the class? See an explanation related to neural

activity by Davidson, pp. 76-77.
Chapter Six: The Master Aptitude

The emotional brain has the power to paralyze the thinking brain.

Working memory: the executive function of mental life; the work of the
prefrontal cortex

Comparing Asian-American children and Caucasian children with

academic success; the former have an emotional edge coming from
dedication and hard work

Impulse Control: the Marshmallow Test; the research of Walter

Mischel; those four year olds with impulse control and delay of
gratification skills (about 2/3 of the subjects) were tested again at
adolescence and found to be
 More socially competent

 More personally effective

 More self-assertive, self reliant

 Better able to cope with the frustrations of life

 Less likely to go to pieces in the face of difficulties

 More likely to persist in challenges

 More trustworthy and dependable

 More initiating and take-charge

 More academically competent in high school

 Better on SAT scores (210 point difference)

The remaining 1/3 of the subjects, without those skills were judged to be
more shy in social contacts, stubborn and indecisive, easily upset by
frustrations, to regress under stress, mistrustful and resentful about not
“getting enough”, prone to jealousy and envy, and overreacting to
irritations with temper and arguments. Poor delay of gratification skills
at age four is a better predictor of later delinquency than IQ score.

Mischel: goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the

essence of emotional self-regulation; a meta-ability

Alpert’s research on test anxiety: two kinds of anxious students: those

for whom anxiety undoes their academic performance, and those who
use anxiety as a motivator for preparation for performance (called
“anticipatory anxiety”)

Good moods enhance the ability to think flexibly, with more complexity,
and to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal.

A hypothetical question to students: Although you set your goal of

getting a B, when your first exam score, worth 30% of your grade is
returned, you have received a D. It is now one week after you have
learned about the D grade. What do you do?

The response to the above dilemma was a measure of the student’s level
of hope. Snyder’s research suggested that one’s level of hope was a
better predictor of first-semester grades than SAT scores.

Hope, defined: “believing you have both the will and the way to
accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.” Hope is negatively
correlated with depression, anxiety, pessimism

Seligman: scores on an optimism scale were a better predictor of

freshman year grades than SAT scores or high school GPA.
“Explanatory style tells you who gives up.”

Review the Seligman research with MetLife: optimists stay with the job,
sell more insurance

Underlying both hope and optimism is a self-perception of efficacy.

According to Bandura, self-efficacy is the belief that one has mastery
over the events of one’s life, and can meet challenges as they come up.

Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow: excellence becomes effortless; a

blissful self-absorption, the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the
service of performance and learning; emotions contained and
channeled, positive, energized and aligned with the task at hand; a state
of self-forgetfulness, egoless

To enter this state of flow:

 Intentionally focus attention to the task at hand

 Engage in a skill at a level that slightly taxes your ability

Mastery is spurred on by the experience of flow. Learning is enhanced
by the experience of flow. How can teachers and parents facilitate this
experience in activities related to homework? According to Gardner,
identify the child’s profile of natural competencies and play to her
strengths while at the same time shore up some of her weaknesses.

Chapter Seven: The Roots of Empathy

Failure to register another person’s feelings is a major deficit in

emotional intelligence; empathy is the root of caring, all rapport

The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read

nonverbals: tone of voice, gesture, facial expression

Review the research of Rosenthal: ability to empathize related to

emotional adjustment, popularity, extroversion, sensitivity to others

Women are better at empathy than men. Can you explain that?

Ninety percent or more of an emotional message is nonverbal.

The developmental unfolding of empathy

 Infants respond to another’s crying by mimicking the cry

 Motor mimicry is the physical imitation of the distress of

another
 Ability to empathize in childhood relates to how parents

discipline the child: calling attention to the distress of others

and relating it to how their misbehavior caused the distress
 Parental displays of empathy help children develop a

repertoire of empathic response

 Attunement: moments of intimacy between parent and child

where the parent matches the baby’s level of excitement

Making love is perhaps the closest approximation in adult life to this

intimate attunement between infant and mother. Lovemaking is, at its
best, an act of mutual empathy.

What are the costs of misattunement between mother and infant? In

the most extreme cases, the author suggests that the result will be
“borderline personality disorder”
Levenson research: the most empathic accuracy occurs between
husbands and wives whose own physiology tracked that of the spouse.

The opposite of empathy is antipathy.

The roots of morality are found in empathy. Explain.

Empathic anger: a feeling of retaliation which wound us through

wounding those we care about

The sociopathy (antisocial personality disorder) does what he does

because of his total lack of empathy for the victim. Is it possible to teach
adults empathy? Can child molesters be treated successfully by
empathy training? See Pithers’ ‘perspective-taking therapy’ as a
model.

Interesting research finding: wife batterers beat up their wives in a

cold, calculating state rather than while being carried away by the heat
of rage.

Psychopathy as a result of neural defect? Is there such a thing as a

“bad seed”?

Chapter Eight: The Social Arts

Social Competence (Social Intelligence)

 Self-control
 Attunement to others
 Patience
 Display rules: minimizing, exaggerating, substituting
 Susceptible to emotional contagion
 Coordination of moods: the essence of rapport

Gardner’s research on interpersonal intelligence at the Spectrum school

identifies four components:
• Leadership skills: organizing and coordinating
groups
 • Negotiating solutions for conflicts: mediating
• Personal connection and empathy
• Social analysis: detecting others’ feelings, motives,
concerns

Warning: interpersonal skills like those above must be balanced by an

astute sense of your own needs and feelings and how to fulfill them. The
social chameleon Snyder calls ‘self-monitoring’. One can be low,
moderate or high in this trait. The ‘as-if personality’ changes based on
others’ expectations.

Social Incompetence: the fear that nothing you can say will interest
another; ineptitude in the most basic social graces

Dyssemia: a learning disability in the realm of nonverbal messages;

poor sense of personal space; misinterpreting body language; poor sense
of prosody (the emotional quality of speech)

When coming into a new group, the two cardinal sins that almost
always lead to rejection are trying to take the lead too soon and being
out of synch with the frame of reference. This is what unpopular
children do.