Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

by Daniel Goleman

Anyone can become angry —that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way —this is not easy.

His delight in the rich possibilities the city offered was infectious.

self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself.

emotional intelligence, which include self-control, zeal and persistence,

and the ability to motiva...

Those who are at the mercy of impulse—who lack self-control—suffer a moral deficiency: The ability to control impulse is the base of will and character.

By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others;

lacking a sense of another's need or despair, there is no caring. And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precis...

cognizance to the realm of feeling

explanation of those most baffling moments in our lives when feeling overwhelms all rationality.

the rare skill "to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way." (Readers who are not drawn to neurological detail may want to proceed directly to this section.)

and how toxic emotions put our physical health at as much risk as does chain-smoking, even as emotional balance can help protect our health and well-being.

bringing together mind and heart in the classroom.

I can foresee a day when education will routinely include inculcating essential human competencies such as self-awareness, self-control, and empathy, and the arts of listening, resolving conflicts, and cooperation.

Aristotle saw, the problem is not with emotionality, but with the appropriateness of emotion and its expression.

But from the perspective of a parent making a desperate decision in a moment of crisis, it is about nothing other than love.

Only a potent love—the urgency of saving a cherished child—could lead a parent to override the impulse for personal survival.

can be read as attempts to harness, subdue, and domesticate emotional life.

Despite these social constraints, passions overwhelm reason time and again.

emotional repertoire tailored to the urgencies of the Pleistocene.

All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act,

While in the ancient past a hair-trigger anger may have offered a crucial edge for survival, the availability of automatic weaponry to thirteen-year-olds has made it too often a disastrous reaction.8

There is a steady gradient in the ratio of rational-to-emotional control over the mind; the more intense the feeling, the more dominant the emotional mind becomes—and the more ineffectual the rational.

feelings are essential to thought, thought to feeling. But when passions surge the balance tips: it is the emotional mind that captures the upper hand, swamping the rational mind.

From the most primitive root, the brainstem, emerged the emotional centers. Millions of years later in evolution, from these emotional areas evolved the thinking brain or "neocortex," the great bulb of convoluted tissues that make up the top layers.

These revolutionary advances allowed an animal to be much smarter in its choices for survival, and to fine-tune its responses to adapt to changing demands rather than having invariable and automatic reactions.

neocortex's talent for strategizing, long-term planning, and other mental wiles.

Beyond that, the triumphs of art, of civilization and culture, are all fruits of the neocortex.

Take love. Limbic structures generate feelings of pleasure and sexual desire—the emotions that feed sexual passion.

The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about our feelings.

Like self awarness

It was a hot August afternoon in 1963, the same day that the Rev. Martin Luther King,

As Robles tells the tale years later, while he was tying up Hoffert, Janice Wylie warned him he would not get away with this crime: She would remember his face and help the police track him down.

Not all limbic hijackings are distressing. When a joke strikes someone as so uproarious that their laughter

Without an amygdala he seemed to have lost all recognition of feeling, as well as any feeling about feelings.

life without the amygdala is a life stripped of personal meanings.

Tears, an emotional signal unique to humans, are triggered by the amygdala and a nearby structure, the cingulate gyrus; being held, stroked, or otherwise comforted soothes these same brain regions, stopping the sobs. Without an amygdala, there are no tears of sorrow to soothe.

the workings of the amygdala and its interplay with the neocortex are at the heart of emotional intelligence.

those moments of impassioned action that we later regret, once the dust has settled; the question is how we so easily become so irrational.

when impulsive feeling overrides the rational—that

Additional signals from the amygdala tell the brainstem to fix the face in a fearful expression, freeze unrelated movements the muscles had underway, speed heart rate and raise blood pressure, slow breathing.

Before he knew quite why, he had jumped in the water—in his coat and tie.

What made him jump in the water before he knew why?

His research has shown that sensory signals from eye or ear travel first in the brain to the thalamus, and then—across a single synapse—to the amygdala;

This branching allows the amygdala to begin to respond before the neocortex, which mulls information through several levels of brain circuits before it fully perceives and finally initiates its more finely tailored response.

this circuit does much to explain the power of emotion to overwhelm rationality.

but LeDoux discovered a smaller bundle of neurons that leads directly from the thalamus to the amygdala, in addition to those going through the larger path of neurons to the cortex.

This smaller and shorter pathway—something like a neural back alley—allows the amygdala to receive some direct inputs from the senses and start a response before they are fully registered by the neocortex.

In a crucial experiment he destroyed the auditory cortex of rats, then exposed them to a tone paired with an electric shock. The rats quickly learned to fear the tone, even though the sound of the tone could not register in their neocortex.

"Anatomically the emotional system can act independently of the neocortex," LeDoux told me. "Some emotional reactions and emotional memories can be formed without any conscious, cognitive participation at all." The amygdala can house memories and response repertoires that we enact without quite realizing why we do so because the shortcut from thalamus to amygdala completely bypasses the neocortex.

a startling experiment in which people acquired a preference for oddly shaped geometric figures that had been flashed at them so quickly that they had no conscious awareness of having seen them at all!