Developing Emotional Intelligence

Improving social-emotional competence is hard work. It requires that the person sees value in developing greater self-awareness and empathy, for example, and also is prepared for relapses as old neural pathways are extinguished and new ones are developed. Consider the following two quotes:

“Capacities like empathy or flexibility differ crucially from cognitive abilities; they draw on different areas of the brain. Purely cognitive abilities are based in the neocortex, the 'thinking brain.' But with personal and social competencies, additional brain areas come into play, mainly the circuitry that runs from the emotional centers —particularly the amygdala—deep in the center of the brain up to the pre-frontal lobes, the brain’s executive center. Learning emotional competence retunes this circuitry.”[20]

“Cognitive learning involves fitting new data and insights into existing frameworks of association and understanding, extending and enriching the corresponding neural circuitry. But emotional learning involves that and more—it requires that we also engage the neural circuitry where social and emotional habit repertoire is stored. Changing habits such as learning to approach people positively instead of avoiding them, to listen better, or to give feedback skillfully, is a more challenging task than simply adding new information to old.”

“Motivational factors also make social and emotional learning more difficult and complex than purely cognitive learning. Emotional learning often involves ways of thinking and acting that are more central to a person’s identity…The prospect of learning to develop greater emotional competence is a bitter pill for many of us to swallow. It thus is much more likely to generate resistance to change.”[21]

A recent publication by Sheldon, Cunning, and Ames (2014) [22] reports the findings of their studies examining how accurately people appraise their emotional intelligence skills. The results indicate that, at least for their professional student samples, those least skilled in emotional intelligence were largely unaware of their deficits and also discounted as inaccurate or not relevant concrete feedback about their performance as measured on the MSCEIT. Compared with top performers, they were more reluctant to improve their emotional intelligence. An inability to recognize either their lack of skills, or the value from improving, makes it more difficult for those who most need improvement to do so. In his second lecture, Uspenskii expressed a similar thought in somewhat different terms:

“The first obstacle in the way of development of self-consciousness (i.e., self-awareness) in man is his conviction that he already possesses self-consciousness or, at any rate, that he can have it at any time he likes.” [23]

The difficulties associated with developing emotional intelligence competencies are also addressed in the Emmerling and Goleman article assigned as part of this lesson. They contend that some development in emotional intelligence can occur through maturation and life experience, and that “the brain circuitry of emotion exhibits a fair degree of plasticity, even in adulthood.” “However…we argue that without sustained effort and attention individuals are unlikely to improve greatly a given aspect of their emotional intelligence (even though) there is research evidence for people’s ability to improve their social and emotional competence with sustained effort and a systematic program.”[24]

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