In this chapter, we will learn what emotional intelligence is according to Salovey and Mayor's model of emotional intelligence. Why is this intelligence is so important in our personal and professional lives? Why is it important to know the difference between emotions and feelings and what are the five universal emotions? What triggers them, what actions do they enable, and how should we describe the intensity of the basic emotion? Therefore, we will cover:
The influence of emotional intelligence on popular culture and the academic community has been rapid and widespread. While this has stimulated a great amount of research in domains such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, sociology and management, the swiftness with which the concept of emotional intelligence has caught on, inevitably created a gap between what we know and what we need to know. In March, 2015, in San Francisco, a group of emotional intelligence experts gathered during the fourth vitality emotional intelligence conference to discuss the importance of emotional intelligence in building teams and effective organizations, increasing employee loyalty and retention, and improving overall success.
The novelty of this conference was the amount of representatives from the tech area—Cisco, Google, Facebook, Zappo, Hewlett-Packard, and so on. Though tech companies still hire based on technical and intrapersonal skills in an attempt to find the most tech-savvy employee to come up with the next big thing, they have started to acknowledge that being tech savvy doesn't always mean good people skills. Evidence supports the belief that real success is achieved when people can play and work well with others on top of being smart and creative with technology. Knowing this new reality, these tech companies teamed up with emotional intelligence experts to train and coach their employees, their leaders, and adapt their corporate culture. The takeaway from the gathering of brilliant minds discussing the importance of emotional intelligence in the tech area was that tech companies are already using Emotional Intelligence skills to:
Despite the good news, the majority of the tech companies around the world dismiss soft skills as a fringe benefit, preferring to hire based on technical skills. Maybe this is one of the reasons that so many tech leaders are increasingly being diagnosed as narcissists and bullies. They are highly valued, very good at what they do, and often highly paid, but the worst nightmare in a leadership position as they lack self-awareness, empathy, self-regulation, social skills, and so on. A workplace is like any other social system - if you don't feel safe, secure, free to voice your view point or your ideas, cared about, or appreciated you will leave to another workplace or burn out. It is time to end the bias that emotions and technical sills cannot work in tandem. You are a human being, therefore, you have emotions and feelings, even if you are not aware of them. Your business is run by emotions—your own emotions, the emotions of your employees, co-workers, stakeholders, shareholders, and customers. The next big thing in the IT area is connected with Artificial Intelligence. And AI is the perfect symbiosis between data and emotions. Don't you think it is time to start learning and enhance the latter, before your smartphone knows more about emotional intelligence than you?
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions.
Salovey and Mayor, fathers of the concept of emotional intelligence, summarized in this way the ability to recognize and control our own emotions and behaviors—while remaining aware of the effect that these have on others around us. At the same time, you understand the emotional state of other people and use this emotional data to adapt your behavior to achieve the most positive response from them. You are just using emotional data to make sense and navigate the social environment you are in. By viewing emotions as useful sources of information, you are bringing together the wisdom of the limbic system and the rationality of the neocortex. Let's break Salovey and Mayor's definition into four branches: perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions.
Salovey and Mayor's Model of Emotional Intelligence
Perceiving emotions;is the ability to identify one's own emotions and to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts.
Perceiving emotions is the base of the emotional intelligence pyramid. Without the ability to accurately perceive and identify emotions in physical states (including body expressions) and thoughts, none of the other skills can be developed. However, the ability to tell the difference between real and false emotions is considered an especially sophisticated perceiving ability when we are able to identify emotions in stimuli such as artwork and music using cues such as sound, appearance, and colors.
How can we begin to develop and improve the ability to perceive emotions? You can always begin by identifying your emotions. To identify your emotions, it is helpful to ask yourself the following questions:
In identifying emotions in others, be aware of the following set of cues:
Using emotions is the ability to harness emotions to facilitate thinking such as deductive reasoning, attention to detail, problem solving, and mood adaptation.
What is the big advantage in using your emotions? Emotionally intelligent people can capitalize fully upon their changing moods in order to best fit the task they have at hand. When you understand which mood is the best for a particular type of thinking, then you can get in the right mood to enhance your thinking and influence others' emotions and the environment around you. For instance, would it be better to complete a task at hand to be in a good mood or in a sad mood? It depends on what you need to complete the task at hand. If you need to look for a solution to a problem and think out of the box, a happy positive mood is the best one. But, if you need to be focused on details to spot errors, a sad mood is your best adviser. Moods are long-lasting effects of a first emotion that trigger in us secondary related emotions, repeatedly, without any clear external trigger. A mood is influenced by your environment (weather, lighting, color, or people around you), by your physiology (what you have been eating, how you have been exercising, if you have a cold or not, how well you slept), by your thinking (where you are focusing your attention), and by your current emotions. A mood can last for minutes, hours, or even days and they are more generalized. They are tied to a collection of inputs not to a specific incident. Ready to learn how different moods affect our thinking?
Understanding emotions is the ability to comprehend emotional language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions.
Understanding emotions encompasses the ability to be sensitive to slight variations in one emotion only, for instance, know the difference between feeling happy and feeling ecstatic. And to recognize and describe how emotions evolve over time, for instance, how shock can turn into grief. The ability to understand emotions is the most cognitive, or thinking-related of the four branches of emotional intelligence and it is based on four underlying principles. The four principles to understand emotions are:
Emotions are complex: Plutchik built the wheel of emotions with the purpose of helping us understand that the six basic emotions when mixed can create a new myriad of emotions that can be similar, opposite emotions, or combined. We often use the term bittersweet to refer to a moment or an event that is simultaneously happy and sad.
Emotions change according to set of rules: You can predict why you or others around you are feeling in a certain way and what will happen next. For example, if a solution architect is feeling content when his development team approved the artifact that he designed to solve a specific problem, it is easy to predict he will feel happy with the results.
Managing emotions is the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and in others, to attain specific goals.
Managing our emotions does not mean we shut down or try to suppress the way we feel. It is exactly the opposite. We stay open to our feelings, even if they are unpleasant. Since emotions contain information, managing our emotions means that we can assimilate our emotional data into our thinking process. An effective emotional management of our emotions is not a question of whether you should strive to control how you feel but rather of understanding how you can, safely, engage and disengage from your emotional states. It is not enough to be aware of what you are feeling. You also need to consider the following:
Emotions and feelings are two entirely different brain processes, though they are often spoken of as being one and the same. Often, but not always, the emotional activation of the brain is over by the time the conscious recognition of the feeling begins. Why is it important that you know the difference between emotions and feelings, anyway?
You should be concerned in learning the difference between the two because the way you behave in this world is the end result of your feelings and emotions. Knowing the difference gives you a better understanding of not only yourself but of the people around you. To control an emotion we need the feeling—we need the conscious awareness of the emotion manifested through the feeling. Unfortunately, due to a lack of emotional education throughout our lives, the majority of our emotional reactions are unconscious for us. How can we control something by reason when we do not even know what is happening? Let's learn the difference between an emotion and a feeling, so that you can start to be more consciously aware of your emotional reactions.
Emotions are chemicals released in our brain in response to our interpretation of a specific trigger. It takes our brain about 1/4 second to identify the trigger and about another 1/4 second to produce the chemicals. The emotional chemicals are released throughout our bodies, not just in our brain, and they form a kind of feedback loop between our brain and body. They last for about six seconds.
We can say that emotions are lower-level responses occurring in the subcortical regions of the brain—the amygdala and the prefrontal cortices—creating biochemical reactions in your body and altering your physical state. Originally, they helped our species survive by producing quick reactions to threats. Emotional reactions are coded in our genes. In the workplace, an angry tone of voice from your boss represents for you a threat—triggering the fear of being fired. Emotions precede feelings, are physical, and instinctual. Because they are physical, they can be objectively measured by blood flow, brain activity, facial microexpressions, and body language. When you encounter a stranger, you may have a range of sensations such as curiosity or fear. When you give that stranger a name, it becomes a significant symbol of meaning. It is through this process that emotions become attached to every object in the universe. When some object is given a name, it not only becomes a thing, it also becomes something of meaning. Emotions establish our attitude toward reality and provide your drive for all of the life's pleasures. Additionally, these emotions are connected to our biological systems and are designed to alert us of danger, or to draw us to something pleasurable. Intense emotions such as the ones that help us survive a threat, are intense but temporary. They are far too stressful to our body. The constant stress would eventually lead to some very serious physical and mental ailments.
A feeling is a mental portrayal of what is going on in your body when you have an emotion. It is the by-product of your brain perceiving and assigning meaning to the emotion. Feelings are the next thing that happen after having an emotion. They originate in the neocortical regions of the brain, are mental associations and reactions to emotions, and are subjective, being influenced by personal experience, beliefs, and memories.
Feelings are sparked by emotions and colored by the thoughts, memories, and images that have become subconsciously linked with that particular emotion for you. However, it works the other way around too. For example, just by thinking about something that you feel is threatening to you, an emotional fear response is triggered. While individual emotions are temporary, the feelings they evoke may persist and grow over a lifetime. Because emotions cause subconscious feelings, which in turn initiate emotions and so on, your life can become a never-ending cycle of painful and confusing emotions, which produce negative feelings that cause more negative emotions without you ever really knowing why—if you don't improve your self-awareness. While basic emotions are instinctual and common to us all, the meanings they take on and the feelings they prompt are individually based on our programming, past and present. Feelings are shaped by a person's temperament and experiences and vary greatly from person to person and situation to situation.
Your emotions and feelings play a powerful role in how you experience and interact with the world because they are the driving force behind many behaviors guided by unconscious fear-based perceptions. Living unaware like this almost always leads to problems and unhappiness, in the long run. As the objects in your world induce emotions within you, they are collected in the subconscious and begin to accumulate. This is especially so when similar events are repeatedly experienced. Ultimately, they form a final emotional conclusion about life, how to live it, and more importantly, how to survive physically and mentally in a world of chaos. When this happens, a feeling is born. Once feelings are established, they are often fed back into your emotions to produce the appropriate result to ensure survivability. Feelings are products of emotions. But unlike short-term, intense emotions, feelings are low-key, stable, and sustained over time.
Researchers agree that all humans, no matter where or how we are raised, have in common five universal emotions - anger, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness. And I would like to add calm to the five universal emotions. Because, a calm, balanced frame of mind helps us understand our changing emotions. We can reach calmness by developing an awareness of our emotions: what triggers them, how we experience them, and how we can respond constructively. Let's learn the states/intensity, actions, and the most common triggers of the five universal emotions.
Anger can be felt mildly, extremely, or somewhere in between. The least intense state of anger is annoyance and can progressively escalate to frustration, exasperation, argumentativeness, bitterness, vengefulness, and fury. The following figure shows a graph of each state of anger and its intensity:
States of Anger
The states of anger are as follows:
:
This is anger caused by a repeated or strong nuisance. The possible actions resulting from exasperation are all the ones mentioned earlier plus dispute. Suppressing exasperation is an ambiguous action. All the other ones are destructive actions.The possible actions resulting from any of the states/intensity of anger as mentioned previously are shown in the following figure:
Actions of Anger
We will now see what they represent:
:
This involves expressing your anger by sulkingThe most common universal triggers of anger are as follows:
Everyone has the same universal triggers as we are born with them. They affect us more intensely than learned triggers. The following figure shows the different triggers of anger:
Triggers of Anger
The most common learned triggers in anger are as follows:
Learned triggers can be part of your culture or highly personal and created by your individual experiences.
Enjoyment can be felt mildly, extremely, or somewhere in between. The least intense state of enjoyment is sensory pleasure that can progressively, escalate to rejoicing, compassion/joy, amusement, schadenfreude, relief, peace, pride, fiero, naches, wonder, excitement, and ecstasy. The following figure shows a graph of each state of enjoyment and its intensity:
States of Enjoyment
Now we will see what each of them represent:
The possible actions resulting from any of the states/intensity of enjoyment are shown in the following figure:
Actions of Enjoyment
We will now see what they represent:
The most common universal triggers of enjoyment are as follows:
Everyone has the same universal triggers as we are born with them. They affect us more intensely than learned triggers. The following figure shows the different triggers of enjoyment:
Triggers of Enjoyment
The most common learned triggers in enjoyment are as follows:
Learned triggers can be part of your culture or highly personal and created by your individual experiences.
Fear can be felt mildly, extremely, or somewhere in between. The least intense state of fear is trepidation; this can progressively escalate to nervousness, anxiety, dread, desperation, panic, horror, and terror. The following figure shows a graph of each state of fear and its intensity:
States of Fear
We will now see what each of them represents:
The possible actions resulting from any of the aforementioned states/intensity of fear are shown in the following figure:
Actions of Fear
We will see what each of these represents:
The most common universal triggers of fear are as follows:
Everyone has the same universal triggers as we are born with them. They affect us more intensely than learned triggers. The following figure shows the different triggers of fear:
Triggers of Fear
The most common learned triggers in fear are as follows:
S
nake-like shapesLearned triggers can be part of your culture, or highly personal and created by your individual experiences.
Sadness can be felt mildly, extremely, or somewhere in between. The least intense state of sadness is disappointment; this can progressively escalate to discouragement, distraughtness, resignation, helplessness, hopelessness, misery, despair, grief, sorrow, and anguish. The following figure shows a graph of each state of sadness and its intensity:
States of Sadness
We will see what each of these represent:
Grief
: This involves sadness over a deep loss. The possible actions resulting from this state are seek comfort, mourn, protest, feel ashamed, ruminate, withdraw. Seek comfort is constructive. Mourn and protest are ambiguous and all the other actions are destructive.
The possible actions resulting from any of the states/intensity of sadness mentioned earlier are shown in the following figure:
Actions of Sadness
We will now see what they represent:
The most common universal triggers of sadness are:
Everyone has the same universal triggers as we are born with them. They affect us more intensely than learned triggers. The following figure shows the different triggers of sadness:
Triggers of Sadness
The most common learned triggers in sadness are:
Learned triggers can be part of your culture, or highly personal and created by your individual experiences.
Disgust can be felt mildly, extremely, or somewhere in between. The least intense state of disgust is dislike that can progressively, escalate to aversion, distaste, repugnance, revulsion, abhorrence, loathing. The following figure shows a graph of each state of disgust and its intensity:
States of Disgust
We will now see what they represent:
The possible actions resulting from any of the states/intensity of disgust mentioned earlier are shown in the following figure:
Actions of Disgust
We shall now see what they represent:
The most common universal triggers of disgust are as follows:
Everyone has the same universal triggers as we are born with them. They affect us more intensely than learned triggers. The following figure shows the different triggers of disgust:
Triggers of Disgust
The most common learned triggers in disgust are as follows:
Learned triggers can be part of your culture, or highly personal and created by your individual experiences.
Though, the five emotions we just learned are the ones that the scientific community accepts as being universal—independently of the culture—two of the pioneer researchers in the field of emotions, the psychologists Paul Ekman and Robert Plutchik, after more than four years of field research across cultures worldwide decided to add more emotions to the five universal emotions that we have covered. Paul Ekman identifies six basic emotions and Robert Plutchik eight basic emotions. Both of them use the five universal emotions as a basis for their work.
Paul Ekman understands that the core of human emotions are: joy (happiness), surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. All the other emotions radiate from these basic core universal emotions as we can see in the following figure:
Paul Ekman´s Six Core Universal Emotions
Robert Plutchik´s wheel of emotions is based in eight primary emotions—joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and anticipation—and uses a color wheel to help visualize the spectrum of emotions and how emotions relate to each other from the viewpoint of intensity, complementary emotions and contrasting emotions, as we can see in the following figure. If your figure is in greyscale and you cannot see the colors you can color the image—coloring is a very relaxing way to meditate. Choose your eight basic colors and imagine an explosion of colors going from the strong brightness in the core center and dissipating its intensity in softer tones towards the edges. It is the same with the emotions, the strong emotion at the core, dissipating intensity towards the edge.
Plutchik´s Wheel of Emotions
In this chapter, we covered why emotional intelligence is important for IT professionals, Salovey and Mayor's emotional intelligence model, the main difference between emotions and feelings, the five universal emotions common to all cultures. Therefore, you have learned that tech companies are already using EI skills to build collaborative leaderships that create impact through people, increase global sales, providing managers with a skill set to help them connect to people and lead with success and even develop tools to help social media users be more empathetic in their online communications, and thus combat cyber bullying.
You have learned that according to the Salovey and Mayor's model, emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions. You learned that these four branches of emotional intelligence work together, what they are and how to enhance them.
You learned what emotions and feelings are and the difference between them. Emotions and feelings are two entirely different brain processes, but we need feelings to control emotion.
You have learned that all humans, no matter where or how they are raised, have in common five universal emotions—anger, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness.
You have learned that each of the five universal emotions has several states depending on the intensity of the emotion and that each state of the emotion is correlated with specific actions that can have a constructive or destructive outcome on your life. You now understand the most common emotional triggers of each emotion and whether they are universal triggers or learned triggers and also learned how secondary and tertiary emotions radiate from the core emotions according to Paul Ekman and Robert Plutchik.
In the next chapter, you will learn the basics of neuroscience behind the most important competencies of emotional intelligence. You will know how the brain processes our emotional data, understands the role of emotions in self-awareness, self-control, change in behavior and defeating thoughts, manages stress, improves decision-making, builds strong and meaningful relationships. You cannot master the emotional intelligence competencies without mastering the basic knowledge behind it.
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