Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

by Daniel Goleman

All the women received standard medical care; the only difference was that some also went to the groups, where they were able to unburden themselves with others who understood what they faced and were willing to listen to their fears, their pain, and their anger.

"Every cancer patient should be in a group like this." Indeed, if it had been a new drug that produced the extended life expectancy, pharmaceutical companies would be battling to produce it.

This finding speaks to one of the many ways patients' emotional needs are unmet by today's medicine. Unanswered questions feed uncertainty, fear, catastrophizing. And they lead patients to balk at going along with treatment regimes they don't fully understand.

the emphasis is on being mindful of emotional episodes as they are happening, and on cultivating a daily practice that offers deep relaxation.

Finally, there is the added medical value of an empathic physician or nurse, attuned to patients, able to listen and be heard.

Such relationships would be fostered more readily if medical education included some basic tools of emotional intelligence, especially self-awareness and the arts of empathy and listening.54

One way to do this that could have broad public-health effects would be to impart most basic emotional intelligence skills to children, so that they become lifelong habits.

Another high-payoff preventive strategy would be to teach emotion management to people reaching retirement age, since emotional well-being is one factor that determines whether an older person declines rapidly or thrives. A third target group might be so-called at-risk populations—the very poor, single working mothers, residents of high-crime neighborhoods, and the like—who live under extraordinary pressure day in and day out, and so might do better medically with help in handling the emotional toll of these stresses.

But emotional care is an opportunity too often lost in the way medicine is practiced today; it is a blind spot for medicine.

If the findings on emotions and health mean anything, it is that medical care that neglects how people feel as they battle a chronic or severe disease is no longer adequate. It is time for medicine to take more methodical advantage of the link between emotion and health. What is now the exception could—and should—be

be part of the mainstream, so that a more caring medicine is available to us all. At the least it would make medicine more humane. And, for some, it could speed the course of recovery. "Compassion," as one patient put it in an open letter to his surgeon, "is not mere hand holding. It is good medicine."

Leslie, unable to please either her father or her mother, contorts her jaw in tension and blinks as her eyes fill with tears.

But by now Leslie is sobbing softly, alone with her anguish. At such moments children learn deep lessons. For Leslie one conclusion from this painful exchange might well be that neither her parents, nor anyone else, for that matter, cares about her feelings.