Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

by Daniel Goleman

group IQ, the sum total of the talents and skills of all those involved. And how well they accomplish their task will be determined by how high that IQ is. The single most important element in group intelligence, it turns out, is not the average IQ in the academic sense, but rather in terms of emotional intelligence.

While a group can be no "smarter" than the sum total of all these specific strengths, it can be much dumber if its internal workings don't allow people to share their talents.

The single most important factor in maximizing the excellence of a group's product was the degree to which the members were able to create a state of internal harmony, which lets them take advantage of the full talent of their members.

In groups where there are high levels of emotional and social static—whether it be from fear or anger, from rivalries or resentments—people cannot offer their best. But harmony allows a group to take maximum advantage of its most creative and talented members' abilities.

Consider, for example, a study of star performers at Bell Labs, the world-famous scientific think tank near

Princeton. The labs are peopled by engineers and scientists who are all at the top on academic IQ tests. But within this pool of talent, some emerge as stars, while others are only average in their output. What makes the difference between stars and the others is not their academic IQ, but their emotional IQ. They are better able to motivate themselves, and better able to work their informal networks into ad hoc teams.

One of the most important turned out to be a rapport with a network of key people. Things go more smoothly for the standouts because they put time into cultivating good relationships with people whose services might be needed in a crunch as part of an instant ad hoc team to solve a problem or handle a crisis.

Star performers, however, rarely face such situations because they do the work of building reliable networks before they actually need them. When they call someone for advice, stars almost always get a faster answer."

The stars of an organization are often those who have thick connections on all networks, whether communications, expertise, or trust.

effectively coordinating their efforts in teamwork; being leaders in building consensus; being able to see things from the perspective

of others, such as customers or others on a work team; persuasiveness; and promoting cooperation while avoiding conflicts.

In the land of the sick, emotions reign supreme; fear is a thought away.

fragile while we are ailing because our mental well-being is based in part on the illusion of invulnerability.

The problem is when medical personnel ignore how patients are reacting emotionally, even while attending to their physical condition.

Modern medical care too often lacks emotional intelligence.

By now a scientific case can be made that there is a margin of medical effectiveness, both in prevention and treatment, that can be gained by treating people's emotional state along with their medical condition.

But looking at data from hundreds and hundreds of cases, there is on average enough increment of medical benefit to suggest that an emotional intervention should be a standard part of medical care for the range of serious disease.

Historically, medicine in modern society has defined its mission in terms of curing disease —the medical disorder—while overlooking illness —the patient's experience of disease. Patients, by going along with this view of their problem, join a quiet conspiracy to ignore how they are reacting emotionally to their medical problems—or to dismiss those reactions as irrelevant to the course of the problem itself. That attitude is re...

the notion that people can cure themselves of even the most pernicious disease simply by making themselves happy or thinking positive thoughts, or that they are somehow to blame for having gotten sick in the first place.

our emotions—and emotional intelligence—play a part in health and disease.

Robert Ader, a psychologist, discovered that the immune system, like the brain, could learn. His result was a shock; the prevailing wisdom in medicine had been that only the brain and central nervous system could respond to experience by changing how they behaved.

biological pathways that make the mind, the emotions, and the body not separate, but intimately entwined.

In his experiment white rats had been given a medication that artificially suppressed the quantity of disease-fighting T cells circulating in their blood. Each time they received the medication, they ate it along with saccharin-laced water. But Ader discovered that giving the rats the saccharin-flavored water alone, without the suppressive medication, still resulted in a lowering of the T-cell count—to the point that some of the rats were getting sick and dying. Their immune system had learned to suppress T cells in response to the flavored water. That just should not have happened, according to the best scientific understanding at the time.

The immune system is the "body's brain," as neuroscientist Francisco Varela, at Paris's Ecole Polytechnique, puts it, defining the body's own sense of self—of what belongs within it and what does not.1 Immune cells travel in the bloodstream throughout the entire body, contacting virtually ev...

to recognize, they attack. The attack either defends us against viruses, bacteria, and cancer or, if the immune cells misidentify some of the body's own cells, creates a...

There was no pathway that could connect the brain centers monitoring what the rat tasted with the areas of bone marrow that manufacture T cells. Or so it had been thought for a century.

Felten began by noting that emotions have a powerful effect on the autonomic nervous system, which regulates everything from how much insulin is secreted to blood-pressure levels. Felten, working with his wife, Suzanne, and other colleagues, then detected a meeting point where the autonomic nervous system directly talks to lymphocytes and macrophages, cells of the immune system.3

This physical contact point allows the nerve cells to release neurotransmitters to regulate the immune cells; indeed, they signal back and forth.

In short, the nervous system not only connects to the immune system, but is essential for proper immune function.

People who experienced chronic anxiety, long periods of sadness and pessimism, unremitting tension or incessant hostility, relentless cynicism or suspiciousness, were found to have double the risk of disease—including asthma, arthritis, headaches, peptic ulcers, and heart disease (each representative of major, broad categories of disease). This order of magnitude makes distressing emotions as toxic a risk factor as, say, smoking or high cholesterol are for heart disease—in other words, a major threat to health.

Taking a more detailed look at the data for specific emotions, especially the big three—anger, anxiety, and depression—makes clearer some specific ways that feelings have medical significance, even if the biological mechanisms by which such emotions have their effect are yet to be fully understood.7

anger seems to be the one emotion that does most harm to the heart. While recalling the upsetting incident, the patients said they were only about half as mad as they had been while it was happening, suggesting that their hearts would have been even more greatly hampered during an actual angry encounter.

being prone to anger was a stronger

predictor of dying young than were other risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

even-tempered.

The Yale researchers point out that it may not be anger alone that heightens the risk of death from heart disease, but rather intense negative emotionality of any kind that regularly sends surges of stress hormones through the body.

These findings do not mean that people should try to suppress anger when it is appropriate. Indeed, there is evidence that trying to completely suppress such feelings in the heat of the moment actually results in magnifying the body's agitation and may raise blood pressure.15 On the other hand, as we saw in Chapter 5, the net effect of ventilating anger every time it is felt is simply to feed it, making it a more likely response to any annoying situation.

for instance, if an elevator is delayed, to search for a benign reason rather than harbor anger against some imagined thoughtless person who may be responsible for the delay. For frustrating encounters, they learn the ability to see things from the other person's perspective—empathy is a balm for anger.

Very important point

As Williams told me, "The antidote to hostility is to develop a more trusting heart. All it takes is the right motivation. When people see that their hostility can lead to an early grave, they are ready to try."

Anxiety—the distress evoked by life's pressures—is perhaps the emotion with the greatest weight of scientific evidence connecting it to the onset of sickness and course of recovery.

One complication in treating depression in medical patients is that its symptoms, including loss of appetite and lethargy, are easily mistaken for signs of other diseases, particularly by physicians with little training in psychiatric diagnosis.

But depressed women who had psychiatric help for their depression along with other medical care needed less physical therapy to walk again and had fewer rehospitalizations over the three months after their return home from the hospital.

This by no means says that positive emotion is curative, or that laughter or happiness alone will turn the course of a serious disease. The edge positive emotions offer seems subtle, but, by using studies with large numbers of people, can be teased out of the mass of complex variables that affect the course of disease.

As with depression, there are medical costs to pessimism—and corresponding benefits from optimism.

Their mental outlook proved a better predictor of survival than any medical risk factor, including the amount of damage to the heart in the first attack, artery blockage, cholesterol level, or blood pressure.

In a study of people paralyzed from spinal injuries, those who had more hope were able to gain greater levels of physical mobility compared to other patients with similar degrees of injury, but who felt less hopeful. Hope is especially telling in paralysis from spinal injury, since this medical tragedy typically involves a man who is paralyzed in his twenties by an accident and will remain so for the rest of his life. How he reacts emotionally will have broad consequences for the degree to which he will make the efforts that might bring him greater physical and social functioning.36

solitude is not the same as isolation; many people who live on their own or see few friends are content and healthy. Rather, it is the subjective sense of being cut off from people and having no one to turn to that is the medical risk.

"It's the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health."43

"Tell us thy troubles and speak freely. A flow of words doth ever ease the heart of sorrows; it is like opening the waste where the mill dam is overfull."

getting people to talk about the thoughts that trouble them most has a beneficial medical effect.44 His method is remarkably simple: he asks people to write, for fifteen to twenty minutes a day over five or so days, about, for example, "the most traumatic experience of your entire life," or some pressing worry of the moment. What people write can be kept entirely to themselves if they like. The net effect of this confessional is striking: enhanced immune function, significant drops in health-center visits in the following six months, fewer days missed from work, and even improved liver enzyme function. Moreover, those whose writing showed most evidence of turbulent feelings had the greatest improvements in their immune function.

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