Emotional Intelligence for IT Professionals

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:

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 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:

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:

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.

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.

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:

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:

The 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:

Learned 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:

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