Emotional Intelligence: Meaning and Nature

Emotional intelligence is combination of intelligence and emotions by using emotions as sources of information that help one to make sense of social environment and navigate them.Emotion refers to a feeling state that conveys information about relationships.  It is also ‘The skill to observe one’s own and others’ feelings, to differentiate among them, and to use those facts to guide one’s thinking and action.’’

Emotional intelligence is a set of organized skills that allows people to process emotionally relevant information professionally and accurately. It is also noted that emotional intelligence overlaps with standard measures organized by the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

There are four branch models of emotional intelligence that describes abilities of various areas of emotional intelligence. More specifically,

• Perceiving emotions
• Using Emotions
• Understanding emotions
• Managing emotions

Perceiving Emotion

It is the non-verbal reception and expression of emotion. Darwin stated that emotional expression evolved in animal species as a form of communication. As we know Facial expressions are universally recognizable in human beings. How human beings recognize and express emotions is the basic question behind the communication studies. The capacity to accurately perceive provides a crucial starting point for more advanced understanding of emotions.

Using Emotions

We use emotions to facilitate thought. The emotions enter into and guide the mental system and encouragerational thinking. Emotions prioritize thinking towards something that grabs our attention. Emotions are important for certain kinds of creativity to emerge. For example, both mood swings, and positive moods, have been implicated in the capacity to carry out creative thought.

Understanding Emotions

Emotions convey information: Happiness indicates an excitement towards other people; anger indicates an attack or harm to others; each emotion conveys its own pattern of possible messages, and actions associated with those messages. A message of anger, mean how the individuals feel and treated. The emotions are associated with specific sets of reactions for an action. Understanding emotional messages and the actions associated with them is important to the survival of the species. Understanding emotions involves the capacity to reason the comprehensive meaning of emotions, coupled with other meanings.

Managing Emotions

Emotions often can be managed and understood to convey information. A Person remains open to encounter emotions if they are not painful, and they try to block out those that are devastating. Within the comfort zone of emotion, it becomes possible to regulate, manage and promote one’s own and others’ emotions towards their personal and social goals. The means and methods for emotional self-regulation vary from person- person and situation.