Describe the historical development of emotional intelligence.

  The concept of emotional intelligence has its roots in early psychologists’ conceptualisation of intelligence. Thorndike in 1920 proposed that intelligence is comprised of three distinct domains or classes: (i) Abstract, analytic or verbal; (ii) Mechanical, performance and visuo-spatial; (iii) Social or practical. Thorndike, thus, expanded on the traditional view of ‘intelligence’ as being purely cognitive by identifying several other kinds of intelligences. Specifically, his social/practical intelligence component indicates emotional intelligence aspect. Howard Gardner (1983) further identified eight different abilities: musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal- linguistic, bodilykinesthetic, logical-mathematical, intrapersonal, interpersonal and naturalistic. Here, the intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences are related to aspects of emotional intelligence. Another psychologist, Sternberg (1985) talked about three types of intelligence such as analytical, creative and practical intelligence. In all these notions of intelligence, we can see the building blocks of emotional intelligence - social intelligence, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences, and practical intelligence can all be said to reflect emotional intelligence abilities.

Gardner’s description of personal intelligences- intra and interpersonal focuses directly on feelings:

“The core capacity at work here is access to one’s own feeling life- one’s range of affects or emotions: the capacity instantly to effect discriminations among these feelings and, eventually, to label them, to enmesh them in symbolic codes, to draw upon them as a means of understanding and guiding one’s behaviour. In its most primitive form, the intrapersonal intelligence amounts to little more than the capacity to distinguish a feeling of pleasure from one of pain…At its most advanced level, intrapersonal knowledge allows one to detect and to symbolise complex and highly differentiated sets of feelings….. to attain a deep knowledge of …..feeling life”.

Salovey & Mayer are widely credited with first using the term ‘emotional intelligence’ in 1990. However, they themselves acknowledge that the term was used much earlier in passing in the 1960s in literary criticism and psychiatry and eventually in a dissertation by Payne in 1986 (Mayer, Salovey & Caruso, 2004). The construct remained largely unknown until it attained popularity when Daniel Goleman published his book on the subject in 1995 and argued that ‘people with the highest levels of intelligence (IQ) outperform those with average IQs just 20 percent of the time, while people with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70 percent of the time’. His assertion that EI could predict job performance and success held intuitive appeal and since then, the concept has become extremely mainstream and received international attention among several domains such as mental health, business, education etc.

For PDF copy of Solved Assignment

Any University Assignment Solution

WhatsApp - 8409930081 (Paid)