Emotional Intelligence Definition

Emotional Intelligence

Definition of Emotional Intelligence

There are many different definition of emotional intelligence described by the experts. According to Salovey & Mayer (1990), emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and to use this information to guide one’s own thinking and behavior. Furthermore, Goleman (1998) described emotional intelligence as managing feelings to express them appropriately and effectively, so as enabling people to work smoothly to achieve a common goal. Another definition of emotional intelligence is the ability to control and evaluate emotions. To put it simply, emotional intelligence is

Self-management is the ability to control or manage feelings, behaviors, and emotions in healthy way. Managing emotions means understanding them and turning the situation to our advantage using that information (Weisinger 1998). Bear in mind that emotional response is not driven by external events but by one’s own thoughts and behaviors. High self-management can helps people to stay positive and not let the anger taking control. Referring to the previous scenario for example, if the leader decide to get mad to the one who contribute less than others, they might end up spending the last one hour to argue to each other. Thus, they cannot get full marks, and for the worse case, that member might not do his best for next assignment because he thought that the leader would not appreciate other’s work. For another example, say that one day an employee came to his boss’s office with a new idea of marketing strategy. However, his boss turned down his idea and even said that it is ridiculous. This offense the employee, but instead of cursing his boss in mind, he believed that this idea is good and thought that he will have another chance to recommend this. Based on this example, the employee has a good control of his feelings and emotions and put it on a positive

Appraisal and expression of emotion is similar and yet different with self-awareness. Self-awareness is about how aware or sensitive is someone to his or her feelings and emotions, the appraisal and expression of emotion is about how to communicate those feelings and emotions to others as well as to perceive what emotions that are expressed by others. The skill to express or appraise and perceive the emotions and then appropriately respond to it is included as emotional intelligence because the emotional information is being process to express and appraise it (Salovey and Mayer, 1990).

Second branch of Salovey and Mayer model is regulation of emotion. It is about how people regulate emotion consciously or unconsciously or in other words the ability to control emotion or mood. Generally, the regulation process of emotion is occurred automatically, for instance someone may feel sad when something bad happens. For more information, emotion, specifically mood, can affect the surrounding areas. For example, if someone looks happy, the people around him are likely to be happy as well.

The last branch is utilization of emotion. Utilizing emotion means that people are able to utilize the emotional intelligence to solve problems. The way that people frame their problems usually more related with the internal emotion that they experience. People with high emotional intelligence can choose