People with a classical view mindset think about emotional intelligence as “detecting” other people’s emotions “accurately,” or experiencing happiness and avoiding sadness “at the right time.” With our new understanding of emotions, however, we can think about emotional intelligence in a new way. “Happiness” and “Sadness” are each populations of diverse instances. Therefore, emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation. (And also when not to construct emotions but instances of some other
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