Emotional Intelligence: Popular Science vs. Scientific Resea
Emotional intelligence has received a great amount of attention in the past decade and has been widely discussed in both the psychological and academic worlds. Research that has been done over the last few years has failed to uncover evidence that emotional intelligence holds any more importance or validity than it did sixty years ago. Numerous books have been written on the subject in the past ten years suggesting, among other things, that emotional intelligence holds a much higher value in determining success in life than a traditional IQ. Some experts say emotional intelligence has become nothing more than a tool used to sell books and raise attendance at seminars.In early 1990 Dr. Peter Salovey and Dr. John D. Mayer published the first scientific works on emotional intelligence. These articles contained the first d
The statements that say emotional intelligence can predict success in life are particularly over exaggerated. Salovey and Mayer define emotional intelligence as the ability to "perceive emotion, to integrate it in thought, to understand it and to manage it. Goleman has now become a multi-millionaire selling his version of emotional intelligence in the corporate arena. " This definition, and the concept of emotional intelligence in general, has been changed to fit a popular version which has been stretched from the original and geared toward selling books, and countless other products. Since the success of his 1995 book Goleman has now set his sights on how emotional intelligence can apply to the world of business, claiming that emotional intelligence somehow will predict how much money one may make. Goleman in fact, completed no scientific research on emotional intelligence, though he has appeared on many talk shows claiming to be the sole expert in a field in which he has created based on the scientific works of others. In his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman makes claims such as "at best IQ contributes about twenty percent to the factors that determine life success". Goleman is not the only person to make a profit from this concept; emotional intelligence has now become a big business. Mayer, a psychology professor in the department of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, claim that Goleman's entire body of work on the subject is unscientific and actually does more harm than good to the field. In his book Emotional Intelligence: Science and Myth Gerald Matthews states that Goleman's version of emotional intelligence, and his claims to the weight it holds in determining success, have no scientific merit whatsoever. Emotional intelligence is now defined in the popular arena in many different ways that don't draw from any scientific studies on the matter. The idea that one single factor can hold such control over ones success may actually harm a persons chance of success, because they become focused too much on one area.
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