Emotional and Social Intelligence

Anonymous

I highly recommend the following two books by Daniel Goleman:

Anonymous

"Those were days when the preeminence of IQ as the standard of excellence in life was unquestioned; a debate raged over whether it was set in our genes or due to experience. But here, suddenly, was a new way of thinking about the ingredients of life success.

Emotional Intelligence - EQ - is a relatively recent behavioural model, rising to prominence with Daniel Goleman's 1995 Book called 'Emotional Intelligence".

Emotional Intelligence links strongly with concepts of love and spirituality: bringing compassion and humanity to work, and also to 'Multiple Intelligence' theory which illustrates and measures the range of capabilities people possess, and the fact that everybody has a value.

The EQ concept argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow; that there are wider areas of Emotional Intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. Success requires more than IQ (Intelligence Quotient), which has tended to be the traditional measure of intelligence, ignoring essential behavioural and character elements. We've all met people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially and inter-personally inept. And we know that despite possessing a high IQ rating, success does not automatically follow"

Goleman identified the five 'domains' of EQ as:

1. Knowing your emotions.
2. Managing your own emotions.
3. Motivating yourself.
4. Recognising and understanding other people's emotions.
5. Managing relationships, ie., managing the emotions of others.

Flame Out

At last there's a way to cool down before we flame online; those folks at Google have come up with a remedy for emotional hijacks at the keyboard.

A "flame" occurs when we're a bit agitated - frustrated, anxious, jealous, emotionally desperate - and compose an email, hit "Send" ... and regret having sent it.

This happens particularly often online, as I've explained in Social Intelligence, because the brain circuitry that kicks in to keep us from embarrassing ourselves while face-to-face on the phone with someone gets no signals online.  The result has been called the "disinhibition" effect; what gets disinhibited is our emotional impulses

When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic channels, it's like having functional Asperger's Syndrome - you are very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle," Shirky said"

http://danielgoleman.info/2011/05/19/the-brain-and-emotional-intelligence-an-interview-with-daniel-goleman/

To hear Clay Shirky and Daniel Goleman in conversation about social computing: http://www.morethansound.net/

J. Kruger et al. "Egocentrism over e-mail: can we communicate as well as we think?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 2005. 925-936.

luv_gardening

I like the EQ book and the one he wrote with the help of the Dalai Lama, Destructive Emotions...  I haven't read the Social IQ book yet.  I think I'd flunk that one, being too socially anxious for my own good.  But maybe I'd learn something from the book that helps.

He's clearly a leader in this field, opening up new areas of study.