HS Digital In Trend conference guest, psychologist and marketer David Caruso clarified the concept of emotional intelligence for Psychologies before his speech, convinced us that it is possible to become “emotionally smarter”, and painted an impressive picture of automatic emotion recognition in the future.
David R. Caruso is a psychologist and management specialist at the Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence (USA). Co-author of the concept of emotional intelligence (together with P. Salovey (P. Salovey) and J. Mayer (JD Mayer), co-author of the most authoritative test for determining the level of emotional intelligence MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test). Conducts seminars and trainings on Co-author (with Peter Salovey) of Executive Emotional Intelligence: How to Develop and Apply (Peter, 2016).
Psychologies: We all know about emotional intelligence thanks to Daniel Goleman, who made it an extremely popular and at the same time vague concept. How would you define emotional intelligence in the strict scientific sense?
The idea of emotional intelligence (EI) was first proposed and developed in 1990 by two psychologists, John Mayer and Peter Salovey. Their work was published only in academic publications, so the general public knew nothing about them. And then Daniel Goleman, a great writer, came along and wrote a book about emotional intelligence. In essence, this is a story about the power of marketing. He recast the idea of emotional intelligence in his own words and the way he understood it, and made it available to everyone. And it was great: if not for his book, I would not be here today, no one would have known about EI. But Goleman, retelling our ideas, greatly expanded them. From our perspective, EI is not what makes someone a good or happy person; we are talking about our skills, about how we are able to recognize emotions (how I feel, how other people feel), understand the causes of emotions, experience different emotions, show empathy.
Pass the tests
- Emotional quotient
The HS Digital in Trend conference for digital marketing professionals, organized by Hearst Shkulev Digital, took place on March 31, 2016 at the Infoprostranstvo event hall.
When is the best time to start developing these abilities? How long does it take to master basic skills?
In an ideal world, emotional intelligence should be developed in early childhood. But we live in an imperfect world, so fifteen years ago we created a program to teach these skills. Because EI is, first of all, skills. And we train first of all managers and heads of enterprises, because they have a great influence on the emotional climate in the organization. Now our ideas are being implemented in schools: we teach teachers how to use emotions in the learning process and how to develop emotional intelligence in children.
We all recognize emotions the same way and feel the same way. Culture sets the rules for when and how we express emotions.
If we talk about top managers, basic skills can be taught in a couple of hours or in a day. Sometimes we call it the Emotion GPS Navigation System. Some people lack spatial intelligence. We can teach them how to read a map and how to navigate a map, but that could take a year. Another way out is to buy them a navigator. It’s the same with emotional intelligence. To begin with, we can test you: what are your strengths and where are your weaknesses. Let’s say you’re not very good at reading other people’s emotions. Knowing this, we can teach you to better understand emotions or ask the right questions. When you ask, “How did you like my presentation?” and another responds, “Oh…that was great!”, you may not hear the intonation and realize that it was actually a terrible presentation. Therefore, we will teach you to ask: “On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is bad and 10 is great, what do you think of my presentation?” And they will answer you: “I think it was 8.” After that, if I were you, I would ask: “What do I need to do to make my presentation a top ten?” And you can be sure that the interlocutor will give you 25 tips for possible improvements.
Are there national and cultural differences in EI levels?
I travel a lot and in addition we have research data. The main difference is how emotionally expressive the inhabitants of a particular country are. Russian culture, for example, is more about emotional restraint. But this does not mean at all that Russians experience emotions less or less often. I was in China for the presentation of our book, and before that I was in Japan, and everywhere the culture is different. But on a deeper level, all people are the same. Our data show that we all recognize emotions in the same way and feel them the same way. And culture sets the framework that determines when and how we express emotions. And in general: culture interests me less than individual people. Perhaps your friends and acquaintances express their feelings in different ways. But one should not think that someone who does not know how or does not want to express his emotions has a weaker EI. Sometimes they are even emotionally smarter, because they listen, process information, understand it.
Manfred Kets de Vris
“The Mystery of Leadership. Development of emotional intelligence»
Emotional intelligence is our ability to be aware of our own feelings, manage them, and recognize and consider the emotions of other people.
Our readers love to look for traits of extroverts and introverts in themselves. Is our way of behaving and expressing emotions related to emotional intelligence?
No, these are absolutely unrelated things! There are high EI introverts and high EI extroverts. But from the outside it looks a little different. The most difficult combination is, of course, low emotional intelligence and pronounced extraversion. Such a person will explain to you how you feel, tell you “You are angry about something today,” and if you do not agree, he will accuse you of simply defending yourself, and it is useless to refute his words. Emotionally intelligent introverts, on the other hand, process information in their heads and don’t show their feelings. Sometimes they don’t seem to go into too much at all, but at the end of the conversation they can summarize it and tell you exactly how you felt and how they felt. And then you realize that they are good at managing their emotions; as a result of such a conversation, you will feel much better, although you will be surprised how much everything turned out to be happening with the interlocutor inside.
Read more:
- Emotions keep us alive
How does the spread of virtual communication affect emotional intelligence? When we do not see the interlocutor, how can we read his emotions?
Online communication is very poor, we have very little information about the other person there. When we meet face to face, we have body language, facial expressions, tone of voice… And when we exchange text messages or emails, or write a post on a social network, we lose a significant part of this wealth. But, on the other hand, I have high hopes for technology. I am sure that in the near future they will allow us to be much “emotionally smarter” online. Already, there are systems that allow using a webcam to recognize the emotional state of someone who is in the frame: the camera can “read” emotions. And I predict that very soon, in the next few years, we will have tools that will allow us to convey emotions in text messages more accurately than we do now. Emoticons are already better than nothing, but I think that we will have much more advanced and sophisticated tools that will help us choose the most appropriate word to describe what we feel.
1 Read the second part of the interview with David Caruso in the June issue of Psychologies.