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Emotional intelligence is a range of abilities, self-awareness, emotional self-management, empathy, social skills. Women tend to be better than men on average at empathy, particularly emotional empathy, sensing in the moment how the other person is feeling and also, at social skills, at keeping things feeling good between people in a group. Men, on the other hand, tend to be better on average at self-confidence, particularly in groups, and at managing distressing emotions.

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DANIEL GOLEMAN:

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist, lecturer, and science journalist who has reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half.

Goleman is also the author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. The book argues that new information technologies will create “radical transparency,” allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made – changing every thing for the better.

His latest book is Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, which he has co-authored with Richard Davidson reveals the science of what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is emotional intelligence?

Daniel Goleman: Emotional intelligence refers to how well we handle ourselves and our relationships, the 4 domains. Self-awareness, knowing what we’re feeling, why we’re feeling it, which is a basis of, for example, good intuition, good decision-making. Also, it’s a moral compass. Say, in part, is self-management, which means handling your distressing emotions in effective ways so that they don’t cripple you, they don’t get in the way of what you’re doing, and yet, attuning them… to them when you need to so that you learn what you must. Every emotion has a function. Also, [marshalling] positive emotions, getting ourselves, you know, involved, enthused about what we’re doing, aligning our actions with our passions. The third is empathy, knowing what someone else is feeling. And the fourth is putting that altogether in skilled relationship. So that’s what I mean by emotional intelligence. There’re many definitions out there. The part of the brain, it turns out, that supports emotional and social intelligence is actually the last circuitry of the brain to become anatomically mature. And because the neuroplasticity of the brain shapes itself according to repeated experiences, so my argument is, hey, we should be teaching kids regularly overtime, in a systematic way, self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skill. In fact, there, now, enough programs and they’ve been around enough in schools that they’re about to publish a huge meta analysis, looking at hundreds of schools and kids that had the program versus those that don’t. Guess what? All anti-social behavior, you know, disruption in class, find that… it goes down 10%. Pro-social behavior, liking school, well-behave, up 10%. Academic achievement scores, up 11%. So it really pays. Executive function, which is mediated by the prefrontal lobe, both helps you manage your emotions and helps you pay attention. So as kids learn these skills, they also learn learning… basic learning skills. I think that the fact that that was an argument was one thing that caught people’s attention. Then, there was a little chapter on… called managing with heart, which argued that leaders who were sons of a bitch were actually defeating the company’s own mission. And I think that made a lot of people happy because they work for people like that. I don’t know… Some people gave it to other people because they thought they needed help in this domain. I’m sure there’re a zillion reasons why people like the book.

Question: Are we becoming more emotionally intelligent?

Daniel Goleman: I hope more. I know IQ has been going up for a hundred years as children encounter more sophisticated cognitive environment as they grow. I don’t know that we’re becoming more emotionally intelligent. I like to hope we would but I t...

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