Emotional thought method

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The emotional thought method (Spanish : Pensamiento emocional) 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.

Contents

Origins

The emotional thought method was created by Carlos Hué, a Spanish psychologist who is a teacher in the University of Zaragoza. This method is explained in the book Pensamiento emocional. Un método para el desarrollo de la autoestima y el liderazgo (Hué, 2007). This book has not yet been translated into English. Carlos Hué gathers a lot of exercises in this method in order to develop emotional skills.

Emotional thought method

Emotional intelligence is based on several competencies intended to help a person gain success in their personal, professional, and social lives. These kinds of competencies are usually acquired in the earliest stages of education and throughout adult life, but they are not taught in a specific way. The reason is that these competencies are said not to be taught, since they are characteristic of each individual's personal maturation.

There are a great number of training actions favoured by companies, public administrations, entities, institutions, and social agents that develop some of these competences. However, there are not complete methods to train emotional competencies.

The emotional thought method illustrates that emotional competencies can be learned throughout life, so they can be taught, learnt and even evaluated.

Emotional competencies

This method proposes seven emotional competencies, four referred to oneself like self-knowledge, self-evaluation, emotional control, and personal motivation; and three more referred to the others, as:  knowledge of others, appreciation of others, and control of them.

  1. The first group concerns the necessary capacities for a relationship: approximation, affability and tolerance.
  2. The second group includes the capacities for creating a link: confidence, comprehension and sociability.
  3. The third group includes three levels of approximation: companionship, friendship and love.
  4. Finally, there is responsibility, as the summary of all of them.

These seven emotional competencies are developed through Several Exercises proposed in the Emotional thought method, as much as in the book of Hué quoted before, as in the TREIN project mentioned below. This method is a systematic project to develop all emotional competencies needed by people, in the workplace, in the family, between friends, in people's daily lives.

In Europe

The European project TREIN (Training in Emotional Intelligence) applies the emotional thought method. It has been translated into English, French, Italian, Swedish, German, Bulgarian, Romanian and Spanish. The emotional thought method, as well as being appropriate to develop mental health, is suitable in work training for teaching emotional competences to employers and employees. It is also an effective method to decrease work accidents and to increase labour productivity.[ citation needed ]

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.

Self-esteem is confidence in one's own worth, abilities, or morals. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs about oneself as well as emotional states, such as triumph, despair, pride, and shame. Smith and Mackie define it by saying "The self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, is the positive or negative evaluations of the self, as in how we feel about it ."

<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.

Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally, in addition or opposition to employing the scientific method, it also relies on symbolic interpretation and critical analysis, although these traditions have tended to be less pronounced than in other social sciences, such as sociology. Psychologists study phenomena such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also study the unconscious mind.

Recognition of prior learning (RPL), prior learning assessment (PLA), or prior learning assessment and recognition (PLAR) describes a process used by regulatory bodies, adult learning centres, career development practitioners, military organizations, human resources professionals, employers, training institutions, colleges and universities around the world to evaluate skills and knowledge acquired outside the classroom for the purpose of recognizing competence against a given set of standards, competencies, or learning outcomes. RPL is practiced in many countries for a variety of purposes, for example an individual's standing in a profession, trades qualifications, academic achievement, recruitment, performance management, career and succession planning.

Competence is the set of demonstrable characteristics and skills that enable and improve the efficiency or performance of a job. Competency is a series of knowledge, abilities, skills, experiences and behaviors, which leads to effective performance in an individual's activities. Competency is measurable and can be developed through training.

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.

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 following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the human self:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of thought</span> Overview of and topical guide to thought

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to thought (thinking):

Display rules are a social group or culture's informal norms that distinguish how one should express themselves. They function as a way to maintain the social order of a given culture, creating an expected standard of behaviour to guide people in their interactions. Display rules can help to decrease situational ambiguity, help individuals to be accepted by their social groups, and can help groups to increase their group efficacy. They can be described as culturally prescribed rules that people learn early on in their lives by interactions and socializations with other people. Members of a social group learn these cultural standards at a young age which determine when one would express certain emotions, where and to what extent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David McClelland</span> American psychologist (1917–1998)

David Clarence McClelland was an American psychologist, noted for his work on motivation Need Theory. He published a number of works between the 1950s and the 1990s and developed new scoring systems for the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and its descendants. McClelland is credited with developing Achievement Motivation Theory, commonly referred to as "need for achievement" or n-achievement theory. A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002, ranked McClelland as the 15th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amygdala hijack</span> Type of emotional response

An amygdala hijack is an emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat. The term, coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, is used by affective neuroscientists and is considered a formal academic term. The amygdala is made up of two small, round structures located closer to the forehead than the hippocampi, near the temporal lobes. The amygdalae are involved in detecting and learning which parts of our surroundings are important and have emotional significance. They are critical for the production of emotion. They are known to be very important for negative emotions, especially fear. Amygdala activation often happens when we see a potential threat. The amygdala uses our past, related memories to help us make decisions about what is currently happening.

Social competence consists of social, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral skills needed for successful social adaptation. Social competence also reflects having the ability to take another's perspective concerning a situation, learn from past experiences, and apply that learning to the changes in social interactions.

Bullying is abusive social interaction between peers and 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.

Social emotional development represents a specific domain of child development. It is a gradual, integrative process through which children acquire the capacity to understand, experience, express, and manage emotions and to develop meaningful relationships with others. As such, social emotional development encompasses a large range of skills and constructs, including, but not limited to: self-awareness, joint attention, play, theory of mind, self-esteem, emotion regulation, friendships, and identity development.

Competence is a polyseme indicating a variety of different notions. In current literature, three notions are most evident. The first notion is that of a general competence, which is someone's capacity or ability to perform effectively on a specified set of behavioral attributes. The second notion refers to someone's capacity or ability to successfully perform a specific behavioral attribute — be it overt or covert — like learning a language, reading a book or playing a musical instrument. In both notions, someone may be qualified as being competent. In a third notion, behavioral attribute and competence are synonymous. One may for example excel at the competence of baking, the competency of ceramics, or the capability of reflexivity.

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