Emotional competence

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Emotional competence and emotional capital refer to the essential set of personal and social skills to recognize, interpret, and respond constructively to emotions in oneself and others. The term implies an ease around others and determines one's ability to effectively and successfully lead and express. [1]

Contents

Definition

Emotional competence refers to an important set of personal and social skills for identifying, interpreting, and constructively responding to emotions in oneself and others. The term implies ease in getting along with others and determines one's ability to lead and express effectively and successfully. Psychologists define emotional competence as the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. [2]

Description

Emotional competence is another term for emotional intelligence. [1] It describes a person's ability to express their emotions completely freely, and it comes from emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize emotions. Individual's emotional competence is considered to be an important predictor of their ability to adapt to their environment, and it refers primarily to their ability to identification, understanding, expression, regulation, and use their own and other's emotions. [3] Emotional competence is often referred to in social contexts, and is considered a capability of recognizing their own emotions, as well as those of others and expressing them in socially acceptable ways. [4] Competence is the level of skill at which a person interacts constructively with others. This personal emotional capacity is based on a person's perception of their emotions and how they affect others, as well as the ability to maintain control and adaptation of emotions.

History

In 1999, Carolyn Saarni wrote a book named The Development of Emotional Competence. [5] Saarni believed that emotional abilities are not innate, but are cultivated and developed through children's interactions with others, especially family members and peers. Saarni defined emotional capacity as the functional ability of humans to achieve goals after experiencing an emotion-eliciting encounter. She defined emotion as a component of self-efficacy, and she described the use of emotions as a set of skills that lead to the development of emotional capacity.

Examples

Understand othersto be aware of other people's feelings and perspectives
Develop othersbe aware of the development needs of others and enhance their capabilities
Service orientationanticipate, recognize and meet customer needs
Leverage diversitynurture opportunities through different types of people

Intelligence Quotient and Emotional Quotient

Daniel Goleman's model

In Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence , he introduced five components of EQ: [7]

Self-Awareness – Know one's internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions. The competencies in this category include:

  1. Emotional Awareness – Recognize one's emotions and their effects
  2. Accurate Self-Assessment – Know one's strengths and limits
  3. Self-Confidence – A strong sense of one's self-worth and abilities
  4. Self-Regulation – Manage one's internal states, impulses and resources.
  1. Empathy – Awareness of others' feelings, needs and concerns. The competencies in this category include:
  1. Understand Others – Sense others' feelings and perspectives
  2. Develop Others – Sense others' development needs and bolstering their abilities
  3. Service Orientation – Anticipate, recognize and meet customers' needs
  4. Leverage Diversity – Cultivate opportunities through different kinds of people
  5. Political Awareness – Read a group's emotional currents and power relationships

Emotional intelligence and the Four-Branch Model

Psychologists see emotional competence as a continuum, ranging from lower levels of emotional competence to perform mental functions to complex emotional competence for personal self-control and management. The higher levels of emotional competence, on the other hand, comprise four branches: [2]

Each branch describes a set of skills that make up overall emotional intelligence, ranging from low to high complexity. For example, perceiving emotions usually begins with the ability to perceive basic emotions from faces and vocal tones, and may progress to the accurate perception of emotional blends and the capture and understanding of facial micro-expressions. [2]

Assertiveness

Building up emotional competence is one way of learning to handle manipulative or passive-aggressive behavior in which the manipulator exploits the feelings of another to try to get what they want. [9] [ verification needed ]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 Air War College (2000-09-21). "Emotional Competence and Leadership". Air War College. Retrieved 2008-01-21.[ dead link ]
  2. 1 2 3 Mayer, John D (2008). "Emotional Intelligence: New Ability or Eclectic Traits?". The American Psychologist. 63 (6): 503–517. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.63.6.503. PMID   18793038.
  3. Brasseur, Sophie (May 6, 2013). "The profile of Emotional Competence (PEC):Development and Validation of a Self-Reported Measure that Fits Dimensions of Emotional Competence Theory". PLoS ONE . 8 (5): e62635. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...862635B. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062635 . PMC   3646043 . PMID   23671616.
  4. Mikolajczak, Moira (February 8, 2014). "Measuring intrapersonal and interpersonal EQ: The Short Profile of Emotional Competence (S-PEC)". Personality and Individual Differences. 65: 42–46. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.023.
  5. Saarni, Carolyn (1999). The development of Emotional Competence. Guilford press.
  6. Mayer, John D (2008). "Emotional Intelligence: New Ability or Eclectic Traits". The American Psychologist. 63 (6): 503–517. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.63.6.503. PMID   18793038.
  7. Goleman, Daniel (1995). Emotional Intelligence [M]. Bantam Books. ISBN   055384007X.
  8. Goleman, Daniel (1999). Emotional Intelligence.
  9. Dickson, Anne (1982). A Woman in Your Own Right . Quartet Books. ISBN   0-7043-3420-8.

Related Research Articles

Emotional intelligence (EI) is defined as the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions. People with high emotional intelligence can recognize their own emotions and those of others, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, and adjust emotions to adapt to environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Goleman</span> American author and science journalist

Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence was on The New York Times Best Seller list for a year and a half, a bestseller in many countries, and is in print worldwide in 40 languages. Apart from his books on emotional intelligence, Goleman has written books on topics including self-deception, creativity, transparency, meditation, social and emotional learning, ecoliteracy and the ecological crisis, and the Dalai Lama's vision for the future.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Empathy</span> Capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing

Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on another's perspective, to understand, feel and possibly share and respond to their experience. There are more definitions of empathy that include but is not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others. Often times, empathy is considered to be a broad term, and broken down into more specific concepts and types that include cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.

A skill is the learned ability to act with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of work, some general skills would include time management, teamwork and leadership, self-motivation and others, whereas domain-specific skills would be used only for a certain job. Skill usually requires certain environmental stimuli and situations to assess the level of skill being shown and used.

Spiritual intelligence is a term used by some philosophers, psychologists, and developmental theorists to indicate spiritual parallels with IQ and EQ.

Cultural competence, also known as intercultural competence, is a range of cognitive, affective, behavioural, and linguistic skills that lead to effective and appropriate communication with people of other cultures. Intercultural or cross-cultural education are terms used for the training to achieve cultural competence.

Social intelligence is the ability to understand one's own and others' actions. Social intelligence is learned and develops from experience with people and learning from success and failures in social settings. It is an important interpersonal skill that helps individuals succeed in all aspects of their lives.

The Emotional thought method develops a group of activities that can be used in a personal or group-oriented way. This method concerns developing Emotional intelligence in a similar way that Daniel Goleman (1995) proposed in his book Emotional intelligence, a bestseller book written in 1995.

Emotional aperture has been defined as the ability to perceive features of group emotions. This skill involves the perceptual ability to adjust one's focus from a single individual's emotional cues to the broader patterns of shared emotional cues that comprise the emotional composition of the collective.

Display rules are a social group or culture's informal norms that distinguish how one should express themselves. They can be described as culturally prescribed rules that people learn early on in their lives by interactions and socializations with other people. They learn these cultural standards at a young age which determine when one would express certain emotions, where and to what extent.

The Emotional Intelligence Appraisal is a skill-based self-report and measure of emotional intelligence (EQ) developed to assess emotionally competent behavior that provides an estimate of one's emotional intelligence. Twenty-eight items are used to obtain a total EQ score and to produce four composite scale scores, corresponding to the four main skills of Daniel Goleman's model of emotional intelligence (derived by crossing the domains of the "self" and the "social" with "awareness" and "management." The Emotional Intelligence Appraisal was created in 2001 by Drs. Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves and comes in both booklet and online format, allowing participants to choose their preferred method of test taking.

Meta-mood is a term used by psychologists to refer to an individual's awareness of their emotions. The term was first utilized by John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey who believed the experience of mood involved "direct" and "indirect" components. While the direct level refers to the simple appearance of mood - happiness, fear, anger, sadness, and surprise, the indirect level, or the meta-mood experience, does not solely consist of the emotions experienced by an individual in the moment. Rather, it is a reflective state which involves additional thoughts and feelings about the mood itself. "I shouldn’t feel this way" or "I am thinking of ways to improve my mood" are examples of reflective thoughts during a meta-mood experience.

The term emotional literacy has often been used in parallel to, and sometimes interchangeably with, the term emotional intelligence. However, there are important differences between the two. Emotional literacy was noted as part of a project advocating humanistic education in the early 1970s.

Communication quotient is the theory that communication is a behavior-based skill that can be measured and trained. CQ measures the ability of people to communicate effectively with one another. In 1999 Mario de Vries was the first to present a theory on CQ measurement. The first scholarly article referring to CQ was "CQ: the Communication Quotient for IS professionals" by Robert Service.

Mental capital means the degree of mastery of life skills at the time an individual faces the choices of life. This term is first introduced by the economist Lok Sang Ho in his book Principles of Public Policy Practice,.

Empathy quotient (EQ) is a psychological self-report measure of empathy developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. EQ is based on a definition of empathy that includes cognition and affect.

Bullying is abusive social interaction between peers can include aggression, harassment, and violence. Bullying is typically repetitive and enacted by those who are in a position of power over the victim. A growing body of research illustrates a significant relationship between bullying and emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence (EI) involves using cognitive and emotional abilities to function in interpersonal relationships, social groups as well as manage one's emotional states. It consists of abilities such as social cognition, empathy and also reasoning about the emotions of others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reuven Bar-On</span>

Reuven Bar-On is an Israeli psychologist and one of the leading pioneers, theorists and researchers in emotional intelligence. Bar-On is thought to be the first to introduce the concept of an “EQ” to measure “emotional and social competence”, although the acronym was used earlier to describe ideas that were not associated with emotional intelligence per se. In the first copy of his doctoral dissertation, which was submitted in 1985, Bar-On proposed a quantitative approach to creating “an EQ analogous to an IQ score”.

Carolyn Ingrid Saarni was a developmental psychologist known for groundbreaking research on children's development of emotional competence and emotional self-regulation, and the role of parental influence in emotional socialization. She was a professor in the Department of Counseling at Sonoma State University from 1980 to 2013.

References