Importance of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage, connect and influence your emotions and those of others. In other words, is using emotional information to navigate in social environment. Although it has been defined in many ways, interest in this field has increased greatly over the last decade. In the past ten years, emotional intelligence has generated a great amount of interest both within and outside the field of psychology. Emotional intelligence has been shown to have an effect on important life outcomes such as creating great personal relationships and achieving enormous results at work. Even though some researchers have been very optimistic about the importance of El in organizations, some critical questions remain about the concept and measurement. Emotional Intelligence was a term invented by two researchers: Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who proposed a model of emotional intelligence to address a growing need in psychology to study individual differences in abilities related to emotion. This resulted in creation of the first ability-based tests of emotional intelligence also known as ?THE FOUR-BRANCH MODEL OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE. The first branch of emotional intelligence includes perceiving emotions. This is the ability to notice and interpret emotions in people faces, pictures, and voices. It also includes the ability to identify one's own emotions. Perceiving emotions involves processing of emotional information; therefore, is the most basic aspect of emotional intelligence. The second branch of emotional intelligence includes using emotions, which is the ability to control emotions to facilitate various intellectualactivities, such as critical thinking and problem solving. The third branch of emotional intelligence includes understanding emotions, which is the ability to understand emotion language and to value complicated relationships among emotions. The fourth branch of emotional intelligence, managing emotions, consists of the ability to regulate emotions in ourselves but also includes the ability to manage the emotions of others.The order of the branches, from perception to management, represents the degree to which the ability is integrated within his or her overall personality. There are many ways to measure emotional intelligence, but the most reliable is the MSCEIT (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso,2002). The MSCEIT has eight tasks: two for each of the four branches of emotional intelligence. In general, El measures have demonstrated adequate internal consistency reliability. Since the concept was invented, supporters of emotional intelligence have claimed that emotional skills matter in almost every area of life from career success to being liked byothers. Although there is no clear evidence, research using the MSCEIT has corroborated a few of them and has offered some new insights. A study was conducted with college-aged students, who were asked to take the MSCEIT test. Based on the results males who scored lower on the MSCEIT reported engaging in drug abuse and consuming more alcohol. In addition, these students reported having more unsatisfying relationships with their friends. On the other hand, students who scored higher on the MSCEIT were more likely to report having positive relationships with others, including greater perceived support from their parents and fewer negative interactions with their close friends.Emotional intelligence also may be important at work. A few employees of a Fortune 500 insurance company, who worked in small teams each headed by a supervisor, completed the MSCEIT. All employees were asked to rate each other on the qualities they performed at work, such as handling stress and conflict well and displaying leadership potential. Supervisors as well rate their employees. Employees with higher scores on the MSCEIT were rated as more responsible for creating a positive work environment. Their supervisors rated them as more tolerant of stress, more sociable, and having greater potential for leadership. Despite its small amount of people participated, the study shows new evidence that emotional intelligence might play a great role in the workplace in the future. Furthermore, future researches need to be done to better understand positive and negative emotional intelligence effects. In fact, emotional intelligence may be a more important contributor to success in life than IQ. In my opinion, emotional intelligence is very sophisticated concept and can be interpreted in different ways. The reason I choose this topic was to enhance understanding about the topic because prior to researching I wasnt familiar with the topic. Personally, I think emotional intelligence is important to first understand and manage your own emotions. Only after you are able to control your emotions, you can try to access other emotions, because in order to understand others you have to understand yourself first. Being able to manage and express correctly your own emotions is a great ability to be learned. For many of us emotional intelligence is not very popular even though is involved in some of the most important things in our lives, such as getting along with people, managing bad moods, and making important decisions. In conclusion, I think emotional intelligence is very important in our life because it can influence our performance at work, mental health, physical health and relationships.

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