lifestyle
101
emotional rescue
Deciphering the buzz word in psychology and using Emotional Intelligence to your advantage by Raj Persaud, Consultant Psychiatrist
M
y friends in the world of advertising insist that the way you sell something like a mortgage, requires a contrasting approach to how you might go about flogging beer. Beer they would contend is a more ‘emotional’ purchase, whilst a mortgage, insurance or pensions, usually involves more thought from the consumer, or as psychologists would put it, more cognition, in comparison. So the term Emotional Intelligence would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Thought, if it’s to be pure and rigorous, is supposed to be devoid of emotional contaminants. Meanwhile if you are in the grip of strong emotion, ie on a date with Claudia Schiffer or Brad Pitt, allowing thought into the frame (ie lets be realistic now, how long is this relationship really going to last?) seems to somewhat spoil things. Emotional Intelligence has been a buzz word in the world of pop psychology and interminable management training courses for over two decades now. But a recent paper published by Marina Fiori in the prestigious journal Personality and Social Psychology Review provocatively asks how much scientific understanding of this concept has actually advanced in the last two decades. Fiori, based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, points out in her paper that a key problem with Emotional Intelligence remains a very weak understanding of what really underpins this talent and how to develop it in ourselves. The persisting and massive allure of Emotional Intelligence remains because it was supposed to explain more success in the real world than dry old academic intelligence. Academic intelligence appeared to predict good exam grades in cloistered removed communities such as universities, but didn’t, it was argued, generalise to the ‘real’ world so much. We could all point at those with brilliant university careers who didn’t seem to amount to much afterwards. Also, there are those with no academic qualifications whatsoever, who nevertheless appear to end up running and owning everything. In the ‘real world’ of grumpy bosses and
tricky colleagues it is vital to understand what was really going on around us, this means being able to spot emotions in others, even if they are trying to hide them, or are not good at communicating them. Sure enough those who score high on emotional intelligence appear better at detecting and interpreting emotional states in others from less information, ie as demonstrated in the laboratory, by just being exposed to milliseconds of another’s facial expression. Knowing that your boss really isn’t as happy as he or she is making out with your team’s work could be vastly helpful in gaining a competitive edge over the colleague who is blithely ignorant of this looming problem. But then comes another problem, which those high on Emotional Intelligence supposedly have an edge over the rest of us. Many are inclined to panic or leap into a world of negative emotion at the prospect of stress or challenge. The more Emotionally Intelligent amongst us aren’t just better at spotting emotions and understanding them, they are also superior at identifying moods in themselves and regulating them. So they are better able to fight panic and stay calm and come up with a more thoughtful problemsolving strategy in the fact of emotionally disturbing predicaments. They key to this is that they can observe their internal lives and stay less involved as emotions sweep in. Not only that though, the emotionally intelligent have a good understanding of how they are going to feel in the future and so don’t make the kind of error the rest of us do, like dating the cad who we know is unreliable and liable to let us down in the future, and so make us feel terrible in the longer term. A further string to the bow of the emotionally intelligent is that they have a better grasp of what the causes of their emotions are. Let’s take a common example. You have a more than usual stressful commute to work and as a result you are grumpy when you eventually at long last collapse behind your desk. Now you have to make an investment decision about whether your bank
should buy or sell a particular stock. You feel negative about the stock but in fact this is only partly because of your analysis of the particular company’s balance sheet, it’s also partly because of your bad mood due to the stressful commute. Often times we make a decision based on an emotion without properly locating where the emotion actually derives from. If our bad feeling about the stock purchase actually more arises from the prolonged commute, we will end up making a poorer decision as a result. This is because we will not have properly understood the true origins of our emotional state. Some may like to rely on intuition - a feeling which cannot be pinned down from whence it arises - but the danger of this is that the emotion may be stimulated by something totally unrelated to the key decision you have to make. The more emotionally intelligent are better at understanding why they feel the way they do and then make decisions that are arise from a more dispassionate appreciation of the role of different inputs on their overall emotional state. What’s intriguing is as we delve into Emotional Intelligence is we discover the component skills are actually more complex than we had first guessed when we believed this was a ticket to easy success in comparison with gaining a good degree. This all begins to sound like rather hard work. Fiori in her paper points out that it does look as if many who possess high Emotional Intelligence are doing a lot of the work unconsciously. They almost intuitively know how to deploy their emotionally intelligent skills without having to work at it. If you want to see unashamed master practitioners of this final skill in action, watch advertising.Yes, even for mortgages. Because emotion comes into everything. n Raj Persaud FRCPsych MSc MPhil Consultant Psychiatrist Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry REFERENCE Marina Fiori. A new look at emotional intelligence: A dual process Framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, Vol 13, No 1, pp21- 44.