The Pros And Cons Of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence has been defined as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions,” (Gantt & Slife 17). Psychologists John Mayer, Peter Salovey and David Caruso argue that some people have a greater emotional intelligence and a greater capacity than others to carry out more intelligent information when processing emotions. While on the other hand, psychologists Gerald Matthew, Moshe Zeidner, and Richard Roberts claimed that the concept of emotional intelligence, as it is defined now is flawed and has no reliable foundation in any of the models of human behavior such as biological, cognitive, coping, or personality. Initially

They stated that “the model included emotion-related qualities such as emotional self-awareness and empathy, into the mix were added many additional qualities, including reality testing, assertiveness, self-regard, and self-actualization,” (Gantt & Slife 17). The first branch of the model is about perceiving emotion which is taking information and transfers it into intelligence. The next step is facilitating thought with emotions and in this step the person is able to use the information and use it to better their thinking. For example, if a person changes their thinking so that they use the emotional information that they learned to enhance their life. Understanding Emotions is the next step of the process this step covers the ability to understand emotional information about other people. In this branch people process and reason with their emotions. Finally, the last branch is about managing emotions to enhance personal growth and the growth of

The reason for this is because they use factual evidence to back their claim about whether or not emotional intelligence is not valid. They state that “We do not find any clear continuum of emotional competence in brain function, in basic information-processing, in high-level cognitions of person-environment interaction, or by re-conceptualizing existing personality traits,” (Gantt & Slife 27), this quote tells us what they found out about emotional intelligence and it backs their claims about whether Emotional intelligence is valid. While on the other hand, the yes side did not take in to consideration the number of stressors or certain personality traits people had. These factors that they ignored could greatly influence the amount of emotional intelligence someone would have obtained. Thus the psychologist on the no side have four topics about Emotional Intelligence that are the reason why they believe Emotional intelligence is a myth. They first myth is “Emotional intelligence is a generalized, far-reaching personal quality covering almost all aspects of emotional functioning,” (Gantt & Slife 27), which means that they have seen many emotional intelligence tests fail because people have many different biological factors influencing them. The second Myth is “Emotional intelligence is directly based on brain systems for emotion,” (Gantt & Slife 27), this myth means that personality studies are