Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?

By JENNIFER KAHN
One day last spring, James Wade sat cross-legged on the carpet and called his kindergarten
class to order. Lanky and soft-spoken, Wade has a gentle charisma well suited to his role as a
teacher of small children: steady, rather than exuberant. When a child performs a requested
task, like closing the door after recess, he will often acknowledge the moment by murmuring,
“Thank you, sweet pea,” in a mild Texas drawl.

As the children formed a circle, Wade asked the 5-year-olds to think about “anything
happening at home, or at school, that’s a problem, that you want to share.” He repeated his
invitation twice, in a lulling voice, until a small, round-faced boy in a white shirt and blue
cardigan raised his hand. Blinking back tears, he whispered, “My mom does not like me.”
The problem, he said, was that he played too much on his mother’s iPhone. “She screams
me out every day,” he added, sounding wretched.

Wade let that sink in, then turned to the class and asked, “Have any of your mommies or
daddies ever yelled at you?” When half the children raised their hands, Wade nodded
encouragingly. “Then maybe we can help.” Turning to a tiny girl in a pink T-shirt, he asked
what she felt like when she was yelled at.

“Sad,” the girl said, looking down.

“And what did you do? What words did you use?”

“I said, ‘Mommy, I don’t like to hear you scream at me.’ ”

Wade nodded slowly, then looked around the room. “What do you think? Does that sound
like a good thing to say?” When the kids nodded vigorously, Wade clapped his hands once.
“O.K., let’s practice. Play like I’m your mommy.” Scooting into the center of the circle, he
gave the boy, Reedhom, a small toy bear to stand in for the iPhone, then began to berate
him in a ridiculous booming voice. “Lalalala!” Wade hollered, looming overhead in a goofy
parody of parental frustration. “Why are you doing that, Reedhom? Reedhom, why?” In the
circle, the other kids rocked back and forth in delight. One or two impulsively begin to crawl
in Reedhom’s direction, as if joining a game.
Still slightly teary, Reedhom began to giggle. Abruptly, Wade held up a finger. “Now, we
talked about this. What can Reedhom do?” Recollecting himself, Reedhom sat up straight.
“Mommy, I don’t like it when you scream at me,” he announced firmly.

“Good,” Wade said. “And maybe your mommy will say: ‘I’m sorry, Reedhom. I had to go
somewhere in a hurry, and I got a little mad. I’m sorry.’ ”

Reedhom solemnly accepted the apology — then beamed as he shook Wade’s hand.

Wade’s approach — used schoolwide at Garfield Elementary, in Oakland, Calif. — is

part of a strategy known as social-emotional learning, which is based on the idea that
emotional skills are crucial to academic performance.

“Something we now know, from doing dozens of studies, is that emotions can either
enhance or hinder your ability to learn,” Marc Brackett, a senior research scientist in
psychology at Yale University, told a crowd of educators at a conference last June. “They
affect our attention and our memory. If you’re very anxious about something, or agitated,
how well can you focus on what’s being taught?”

Once a small corner of education theory, S.E.L. has gained traction in recent years, driven in
part by concerns over school violence, bullying and teen suicide. But while prevention
programs tend to focus on a single problem, the goal of social-emotional learning is
grander: to instill a deep psychological intelligence that will help children regulate their
emotions.

For children, Brackett notes, school is an emotional caldron: a constant stream of academic
and social challenges that can generate feelings ranging from loneliness to euphoria.
Educators and parents have long assumed that a child’s ability to cope with such stresses is
either innate — a matter of temperament — or else acquired “along the way,” in the rough
and tumble of ordinary interaction. But in practice, Brackett says, many children never
develop those crucial skills. “It’s like saying that a child doesn’t need to study English
because she talks with her parents at home,” Brackett told me last spring. “Emotional skills
are the same. A teacher might say, ‘Calm down!’ — but how exactly do you calm down
when you’re feeling anxious? Where do you learn the skills to manage those feelings?”

A growing number of educators and psychologists now believe that the answer to that
question is in school. George Lucas’s Edutopia foundation has lobbied for the teaching of
social and emotional skills for the past decade; the State of Illinois passed a bill in 2003
making “social and emotional learning” a part of school curriculums. Thousands of schools
now use one of the several dozen programs, including Brackett’s own, that have been
approved as “evidence-based” by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional
Learning, a Chicago-based nonprofit. All told, there are now tens of thousands of emotional-
literacy programs running in cities nationwide.

The theory that kids need to learn to manage their emotions in order to reach their potential
grew out of the research of a pair of psychology professors — John Mayer, at the University
of New Hampshire, and Peter Salovey, at Yale. In the 1980s, Mayer and Salovey became
curious about the ways in which emotions communicate information, and why some people
seem more able to take advantage of those messages than others. While outlining the set of
skills that defined this “emotional intelligence,” Salovey realized that it might be even more
influential than he had originally suspected, affecting everything from problem solving to
job satisfaction: “It was like, this is predictive!”

In the years since, a number of studies have supported this view. So-called noncognitive
skills — attributes like self-restraint, persistence and self-awareness — might actually be
better predictors of a person’s life trajectory than standard academic measures. A 2011
study using data collected on 17,000 British infants followed over 50 years found that a
child’s level of mental well-being correlated strongly with future success. Similar studies
have found that kids who develop these skills are not only more likely to do well at work but
also to have longer marriages and to suffer less from depression and anxiety. Some evidence
even shows that they will be physically healthier.

This was startling news. “Everybody said, Oh, it’s how kids achieve academically that will
predict their adult employment, and health, and everything else,” recalls Mark Greenberg, a
Penn State University psychologist. “And then it turned out that for both employment and
health outcomes, academic achievement actually predicted less than these other factors.”

Should social-emotional learning prove successful, in other words, it could generate a string
of benefits that far exceeds a mere bump in test scores. This prospect has led to some
giddiness among researchers. Maurice Elias, a psychology professor at Rutgers University
and the director of the Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab, has lauded emotional
literacy as “the missing piece” in American education.

But finding ways to measure emotional awareness — never mind its effects — is tricky. It’s
also still unclear whether S.E.L. programs create the kind of deep and lasting change they
aspire to. The history of education reform is rife with failures: promising programs that
succeed in studies, only to falter in the real world. The phenomenon is so common that
researchers even have a name for it: the Hawthorne effect — the fact that simply focusing
attention on something, like a school, is enough to cause a temporary uptick in
performance.
The problem of evaluating S.E.L. is compounded both by the variety of “prosocial”
programs on offer and by the ways in which they end up being used in the classroom. Some
of them — including one of the most popular, Second Step — are heavily scripted: teachers
receive grade-appropriate “kits” with detailed lesson plans, exercises and accompanying
videos.
Others, like Facing History and Ourselves — in which children debate personal ethics after
reading the fictionalized letters of a Nazi colonel and a member of the French Resistance —
are more free-form: closer to a college philosophy seminar than to a junior-high civics class.
" ‘Mindful eating’ is social-emotional learning, according to some people,” Brackett told me.
“It’s a mess. Everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon.”

David Caruso, a psychologist who does consulting and training in emotional intelligence,
has called the current boom in social-emotional programs “promising,” but he worries that
the field might be getting ahead of itself. “There are people who want to write this into the
Common Core right now,” Caruso told me. “But before we institutionalize this, we’d better
be sure that it makes a difference in the long run.”

Leataata Floyd Elementary, a school in a low-income part of Sacramento, has few

problems with gangs or guns but a long history of dysfunction. Until recently, the staff
attrition rate was more than 20 percent a year, and student test scores were regularly among
the lowest in the state. Before the current principal, Billy Aydlett, was hired in 2010, there
were six separate principals in five years.

Not long after he arrived, Aydlett created a detailed plan to boost the school’s academic
performance. He recruited a roster of highly regarded teachers and developed an aggressive
new curriculum full of rich and invigorating lessons. Once the school year started, however,
it became clear that the new strategy was a bust. “Literally within the first month of school,
we realized that we hadn’t planned for the right thing,” Aydlett recalled when I visited the
school last spring. “What we discovered was that these kids weren’t going to be able to make
progress on the academics until they’d gotten help with their social and emotional issues.”

With the district’s support, Aydlett attended social-emotional learning training. The
program was an unlikely choice for Aydlett — a socially awkward man who confesses to
being “awful” at ordinary human encounters. But since beginning the emotional-literacy
work, Aydlett said, he had become more aware of interpersonal dynamics, and even made
going on a vacation with his wife a priority — something he never bothered to do before. (“I
didn’t see the point in that kind of connectedness,” he admitted. “But I’ve learned that it’s
important.”) On the morning I visited, he stood greeting children at the gate with high-
fives, then led me to the classroom of Jennifer Garcia, who teaches second grade.
As Aydlett and I watched, Garcia walked her class through an exercise in nonverbal cues,
asking the children to imagine times when they felt sad or angry or frustrated, and then to
freeze in those expressions and postures. As the kids slumped forward in exaggerated
positions of woe, Garcia complimented them on small details: a bowed head or hangdog
expression. Afterward, Garcia turned to the class. “This is the thinking part of your brain,”
she said, holding up her thumb. She pointed to her fingers. “And this is the feeling part of
your brain.” Folding her thumb into the center of her palm, she closed her fingers around it.
“When we have strong emotions, the thinking part of our brain can’t always control them,”
Garcia explained, waggling her fist. “What do we do in those moments?” As the kids called
out answers — counting to five, “self-talk,” “dragon breaths” (a kind of deep-breathing
exercise) — Garcia nodded.

Such strategies may seem simplistic, but researchers say they can have a profound effect.
When I spoke with Mark Greenberg, who developed a social-emotional curriculum known
as Paths (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies), he noted that repeatedly practicing
these skills means they gradually become automatic. “The ability to stop and calm down is
foundational in those moments.”

The value of such skills was evident later that day, when I sat in on a fourth-grade class
meeting, in which students worked through interpersonal conflicts as a group. Sitting in a
circle on the carpet, Anthony, a small boy in a red shirt, began by recounting how he cried
during a class exercise and was laughed at by some of the other students. Asked whether he
thought the kids were giggling to be mean, or just giggling because they were
uncomfortable, Anthony paused. “I think that some people didn’t know what to do, and so
they giggled,” he admitted finally — though he was also adamant that a few of the kids were
actually laughing at him. “I was really sad about that,” he added.

Though Anthony was still upset, his acknowledgment that not all the kids were snickering —
that some may just have been laughing nervously — felt like a surprisingly nuanced insight
for a 9-year-old. In the adult world, this kind of reappraisal is known as “reframing.” It’s a
valuable skill, coloring how we interpret events and handle their emotional content. Does a
casual remark from an acquaintance get cataloged as a criticism and obsessed over? Or is it
reconsidered and dismissed as unintentional?

Depending on our personalities, and how we’re raised, the ability to reframe may or may
not come easily. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, notes that while one child may stay rattled by an event for days or weeks, another
child may rebound within hours. (Neurotic people tend to recover more slowly.) In theory,
at least, social-emotional training can establish neurological pathways that make a child
less
vulnerable to anxiety and quicker to recover from unhappy experiences. One study found
that preschoolers who had even a single year of a social-emotional learning program
continued to perform better two years after they left the program; they weren’t as physically
aggressive, and they internalized less anxiety and stress than children who hadn’t
participated in the program.

It may also make children smarter. Davidson notes that because social-emotional training
develops the prefrontal cortex, it can also enhance academically important skills like
impulse control, abstract reasoning, long-term planning and working memory. Though it’s
not clear how significant this effect is, a 2011 meta-analysis found that K-12 students who
received social-emotional instruction scored an average of 11 percentile points higher on
standardized achievement tests. A similar study found a nearly 20 percent decrease in
violent or delinquent behavior.

When I spoke with teachers at Leataata Floyd, they reported seeing similar results. One
teacher remembered the pre-S.E.L. school as being out of control, with kids throwing food
and angrily upending their desks in class. Now, she says, “they may still blow up, but they
take responsibility. That’s a new thing: they always used to blame somebody else. For them
to take responsibility — it’s huge.”

Starting in the late 19th century, the philosopher John Dewey argued against the
development of purely vocational elementary schools, insisting that the true purpose of
schooling was not simply to teach children a trade but to train them in deeper habits of
mind, including “plasticity” (the ability to take in new information and be changed by it)
and interdependence (the ability to work with others).

Social-emotional learning takes Dewey’s theory further, suggesting that all emotions — not
just the right ones — are adaptive if properly managed. Studies have shown that people in a
slightly sad mood are better at analyzing or editing a written document (they focus better on
details), while people who are slightly angry are better able to discriminate between weak
and strong arguments. The purpose of a social-emotional learning program, then, isn’t to
elide emotion but to channel it: to surf the rapids rather than to be swamped by them. This
can be hard to do. When we feel angry, we usually act angry — even when that makes the
situation worse. The nature of emotion is that it tends to run away with us. “When a feeling
is unpleasant, how are you going to handle it?” asks Stephanie Jones, a Harvard
psychologist who has studied a number of social-emotional learning programs. “Do you
default to an angry response, a defensive response? Or do you go into a mode that’s more
information- seeking?”
Social-emotional learning programs often rely on strategies from conventional therapy, like
the ability to get distance on a feeling, or to unpack the deeper emotions that may be hidden
within it. But fostering these skills in a child is a complex undertaking. For a child to master
empathy, Jones notes, she first needs to understand her own emotions: to develop a sense
of what sadness, anger or disappointment feels like — its intensity and duration, its causes.
That awareness is what lays the groundwork for the next step: the ability to intuit how
another person might be feeling about a situation based on how you would feel in a similar
circumstance.

When it comes to making social-emotional learning effective, Jones says, determining

which skills can constructively be taught at what ages is “a critically important question.” So
far, however, few studies have been done on which skills are actually acquired through
S.E.L., and even fewer have included the kind of rigorous, controlled trials needed to prove
that acquiring a specific skill produces a specific outcome over the long term. “If skills aren’t
nurtured in an ongoing way,” Jones says, “it may be that those skills are lost.”

Even a handful of poorly designed programs, Caruso notes, could cause educators who are
just warming up to the idea of a social-emotional curriculum to dismiss the entire field.
Critics already charge that social-emotional programs are a kind of “therapy light” and a
waste of valuable classroom time. In 2010, a report from the U.S. Department of Education
that evaluated seven different S.E.L. programs found no increase in academic achievement
and no decline in behavioral problems. S.E.L. supporters criticized the study’s methodology
and pointed out that the researchers couldn’t be sure that the comparison schools weren’t
using S.E.L. techniques even if they weren’t using a formal program. Still, to show that
S.E.L. is effective, Caruso says, programs will have to be tested the same way a new
pharmaceutical is: through a randomized trial that could distinguish short-term placebo
effects from lasting improvements. Without such evidence, social-emotional learning could
go the way of the self
-esteem movement, an ill-fated program from the 1980s in which schoolchildren repeated
mantras like “I am special” and “I am beautiful.” At the time, it, too, was considered the
height of progressive education. The program was largely abandoned after it ended up being
connected to rising rates of narcissism.

“It’s a big messy field, with a lot of promises, but very little data,” Caruso says of S.E.L.
“Right now I think people are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.”

One of social-emotional learning’s “stickiest” programs is Second Step, the plug-and-

play curriculum that provides teachers with grade-appropriate emotional-skills lessons.
Originally developed as a violence-prevention program in 1986, Second Step is currently
used by approximately 25,000 schools in the U.S. and Canada, according to Joan Cole
Duffell, executive director of Committee for Children, the nonprofit behind the program.

At Ella Flagg Young School in Chicago, I sat in on a sixth-grade Second Step class taught by
Latasha Little-Brown, the dedicated “social-emotional learning coordinator” who has
worked at the school for nine years. That day, Little-Brown began by playing a Second Step
video featuring good friends, Lydia and Maria. In the story, Maria’s aunt gives her a cool
new necklace, which has beads made of paper. Lydia loves it, so Maria lets her borrow it.
But as Lydia is walking back from the party, it suddenly starts to rain and the necklace is
ruined.
Lydia doesn’t know what to do.

In the teachers’ edition of the exercise, the goal is for students to write out the steps of an
apology, including reparation. (Step 1: “Maria, I was wrong for taking the necklace and not
caring for it properly.” Step 2: Offer to pay for the necklace.) Little-Brown nudged the
students in this direction, until one boy — a chubby kid who had kept his jacket and
backpack on during the entire class — finally raised his hand in frustration. Lydia hadn’t
been negligent, he pointed out: she’d just been walking home and got soaked by a
thunderstorm. How was the loss of the necklace her fault?

Lawyering ensued. One girl insisted that Lydia could have put the necklace in her pocket, or
balled it up in her hand — leading another student to argue that just clutching the necklace
in a downpour wouldn’t have protected it. Meanwhile, Backpack Boy was still trying to
parse the details of friendly obligation. If someone dumped a bucket of water on you as you
walked by, he wanted to know, would that be your fault? What if someone robbed you or
threatened you with a gun?

Little-Brown allowed the debate to go on for several minutes, then moved crisply to the
official point of the lesson: that once a thing is in your possession, you are responsible for it.
The class ended with each group writing the steps of restitution on a piece of poster board.
It was a disappointing moment. Though Little-Brown was engaged and thoughtful, the class
still felt more like a rote exercise in social obligation than a nuanced exploration of a
complicated issue. It was hard to believe that the resolution was satisfying to someone like
Backpack Boy — one of the few students who seemed eager to wrestle with the knotty issues
on which justice can turn.

Later, I mentioned this incident to Marc Brackett. Like many researchers, Brackett worries
about the spread of programs like Second Step, in part because they can be overly formulaic.
He is also concerned that they can serve as social-emotional placebos, allowing
administrators to seem as if they’re working to fix a troubled school without actually doing
anything. “When the superintendent wants to show the state that they bought their anti-
bully program, or whatever, they buy these kits,” he said. “But then the box just sits on the
shelf."(To be fair, Brackett’s program is one of Second Step’s competitors. Duffell says that
Second Step is “dedicated to good-quality implementation” and now has an online system to
monitor how teachers use the program.)

Brackett’s program, Ruler, created with David Caruso and others, is more intensive. A
school interested in trying Ruler must sign a three-year commitment that involves regular
training, including Brackett’s four-day “Anchors of Emotional Intelligence” workshop,
which costs $1,800 per person. Though Brackett emphasized to me that Ruler is used by a
variety of schools, in a range of income brackets, the program costs significantly more than
Second Step, especially when teacher and staff training is factored in. (Only about 500
schools use Ruler.)

In the Ruler cosmology, social-emotional lessons aren’t restricted to one class a week, or
even to one class a day. Rather, such moments of observation are expected to pervade every
class, from English and math to music and P.E. “Emotional skills aren’t something that
develop overnight,” Brackett emphasized. “For most people, it will take a lot of practice.”

Starting in kindergarten, students begin each day by locating themselves on the “mood
meter,” a set of four colored squares — blue for moods like malaise, yellow for excitement —
that represent the four quadrants of emotional experience. (The other squares are red, for
anger, and green, for calm.) The goal is to develop children’s capacity for self-reflection and
critical thinking. “We never say, ‘The best thing to do is to take three deep breaths,’ ”
Brackett told me. “For some people, taking deep breaths works. But for me, when I take
deep breaths, I just think about how I can wring your neck.”

Growing up, Brackett told me, he was bullied “horrifically” — the kind of experience he
believes Ruler could help prevent. Not long after being hired at Yale, he said, he went back
to his old school, hoping to persuade it to implement the program. “I said, ‘I’ll give you a gift
that would normally cost $100,000’ ” — what the Ruler program can amount to, with all the
training. “They said, ‘Oh, that’s O.K. — we already have a speaker on emotional intelligence.’
”

Even now, Brackett says, many educators don’t grasp the importance of emotional
awareness. For Ruler to work, he maintains, the tools need to be embraced not just by
students but also by teachers and administrators. “They have to be able to walk around that
school and say: ‘Hey, where are you on the mood meter? I’m in the yellow right now. I’m
feeling excited, how about you?’ or ‘Man, I had a really tough morning. I had to take a meta-
moment because that parent was so crazy, I really had to manage my emotions.’ ”

Brackett’s approach may strike some as overkill, but a growing number of social-emotional
learning programs now offer separate training for teachers. “It’s like that old airplane
maxim,” Mark Greenberg told me. “Put your own mask on before you put your child’s on.
You have to help yourself first.” Greenberg notes that a great teacher can change how
students learn and behave, creating a climate that is engaged, caring and respectful. In
theory, S.E.L. training could help more teachers develop those skills. “The one constant in
education research has been the power of these great teachers,” Greenberg said. “What has
been less clear is how you bottle that.”

Located high in the hills a few miles north of Berkeley, Prospect Sierra, a private
elementary school, is also a Ruler school. It’s a cheerful place filled with the subtle
accessories of wealth: airy classrooms outfitted with iMacs and a sprawling sports field with
an unobstructed view of the San Francisco Bay.

Walking the halls one day last spring, I spied posters for empathy (“I say what I am feeling,
and listen empathetically to what the other person is saying”), with examples of various
mood meters, including one made by first graders that struck me as both impressive and
alarming. Alongside “energetic,” “peaceful,” and “curious,” the meter listed “frantic,”
“lonely,” “depressed,” “excluded” and “joyless.”

In the afternoon, I joined a P.E. class to watch a capture-the-flag-style game, in which teams
tried to retrieve colored banners without being tagged. The teacher, a lean, blond woman
named Jacqueline Byrne Bressan, began by having students sit in a circle to discuss
problems that came up in the last game and how they could be prevented this time around.
One boy, whose silky brown hair gave him the look of a miniature British soccer star, raised
his hand to note that “some people” hadn’t been willing to “roshambo” — do “rock, paper,
scissors” — the school’s accepted practice for settling disputes over whether a player had
been tagged or not. When Bressan asked what he did about that, the boy sat up. “I told them
they weren’t playing fair,” he said solemnly. “And then I let it go.”

Not long after this discussion, I watched as a beefy blond kid in a red shirt and white Nikes
was patently tagged by a small brown-haired girl, but kept running. “You’re tagged!” the girl
yelled. Another boy echoed her: “You’re tagged!” The boy yelled back, “No, I’m not!”
Glancing at Bressan, he slowed briefly to a walk — then moved furtively around the edge of
the field and sneaked back into the game.
Watching this, Bressan smiled dryly. The beefy boy, she observed, is “one of the kids who
really struggles” with basic social-emotional concepts like fairness and accountability. But
she also said she felt that he was gradually improving. “It used to be, he wouldn’t roshambo
at all,” she said. “Or he’d lie and say that he did. Now it may take a minute, but he usually
does it.”

While it was hard to tell if roshambo was teaching deeper lessons of fairness and problem-
solving, Bressan told me that it radically cut the number of arguments she had to resolve,
and also made it easy to identify the kids who needed more help socially. She also said that
it gave the other students the moral authority to hold another player accountable.

There seemed to be something to this. While the game had its share of elementary-school
drama (at one point, a girl started to cry after a boy bragged that he was faster than her “by a
million miles”), it was noticeable how quickly most kids moved on. A tiny blond girl who was
in tears over being pushed — her new white jeans now had a grass stain on the knee —
handled the matter by walking once around the field, then talking about it in the postgame
debriefing. “We talked about not tagging too hard during the game, but it was still
happening,” she said, sounding surprisingly sanguine.

When I mentioned this to Bressan, she nodded. “I think it makes a difference sometimes for
them just to be able to say it,” she said. “Just to have it discussed.”

Talking later, Bressan told me that in her last job, at an inner-city school in New York,
students behaved differently; when one kid was punched in the stomach during recess, she
recalled, he didn’t even go to the teacher. By comparison, it was hard to know how the kids
at Prospect Sierra might fare in the “real world.” But she added, “The real question is: What
kind of world do we want?”

That question is one that Marc Brackett thinks about often. He envisions a generation of
kids who have grown up immersed in an environment of total emotional awareness — who
receive new insights at the developmentally appropriate times, and in deliberately
constructive ways.

“If you have that kind of instruction, from kindergarten,” he said, “I think that in 20 years
the world will be a very different place.”

Jennifer Kahn teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.
She last wrote for the magazine about prepsychopathic children.
Emotional intelligence – conceptual delimitations
Almost a century ago, Thorndike had the foresight to announce to the world that IQ is
not the sole type of intelligence. And he was right. What he was referring to is emotional
intelligence, the product of two main factors – personal and social competency –
without which one cannot envisage the human personality of the 21 st century. Emotions
have taught humanity how to think, Luc de Vauvenargues said.
Those emotions that are not dealt with disrupt the mind and body while those emotions
that are transformed in abilities ensure a better productivity, more satisfactions derived
from everyday activities and positive interpersonal relationships, they drive us to assume
accountability as well as bolster up our self-control, among many other things.
They function as a delicate and sophisticated interior guidance system, that warns us when
we lack natural impulse and helps us survive and make decisions based the
assimilated information, to draw the necessary lines to protect our physical and
mental health, to communicate as good as possible with the others by being more
receptive to other people’s emotional problems and make them feel respected, important,
understood and loved. Our unity as a species was built step by step based on feelings of
cooperation, compassion and forgiveness and not on our religious, political, cultural
beliefs that have, unfortunately separated us on too many occasions in a tragic and
sometimes fatal way.

1.1. Wayne Leon Payne

The concept of emotional intelligence was formulated for the first time in a PhD
thesis, in the U.S.A., in 1985, by Wayne Leon Payne who believes that emotional
intelligence is an ability that involves a creative relationship with fear, pain
and desire. The adaptation of a person to the environment they live in is made both
through cognitive elements and through the non/cognitive ones. The non-cognitive
elements of intelligence include emotional, personal and social agents, which are all
essential for the person’s success in life.
Using connected concepts like social skills, interpersonal competency, psychological maturity and
emotional conscience, social development, social and emotional learning and personal intelligence in
investigating the dimensions of emotional intelligence to obtain an increase in the level of social and
emotional competency, some connections between emotional intelligence and the other phenomena –
individual performance, group performance, interpersonal social changes, adaptation to change, leadership
– have been highlighted.

1.2. John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey

Defining emotional intelligence as skills by which a person can discriminate and monitorize his own
and other people’s emotions, as well as the capacity of using the information which guides his own way of
thinking and acting, Salovey and Mayerdo nothing but demonstrate the level of implication of the cognitive
processes and all the others that monitorize both his own emotions and other people’s emotions.

1.3. Daniel Goleman

Five years later, Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence (EI) as a capacity of self-control and
control of stress and negative emotions; a meta-ability which determines and influences the way and the
efficiency with which we can use our other capacities and abilities, including educational intelligence.
Integrating in EI the concepts used by Gardner, intrapersonal intelligence (the labeling of his own
emotions) and interpersonal (the understanding of other people’s emotions) also needs to include abilities
that can be categorized into five fields: self consciousness, emotions control, self – motivation,
empathy, the capacity of creating relations.

1.4. David Caruso and Charles J. Wolfe

Caruso and his predecessors believe that emotional intelligence is the ability of processing
emotional information, especially the ones that presuppose perception, assimilation,
understanding and control of emotions (Mayer, Cobb, 2000) which is manifested at the level of
“four levels of mental ability”:
 The perception, knowledge and expression of emotions
 Emotional facilitation of the way of thinking
 The understanding and analysis of emotions; the usage of emotional knowledge
 Reflexive control of emotions, the way towards emotional and intellectual development.
Generalizing, emotional intelligence represents the capacity of recognizing, understanding and
using emotions for making the best decisions and motivating oneself to apply them and as a
base of verbal and non-verbal communication, it sustains:
 the facilitation of new relations with the people that we feel attracted to or with those on whom we
depend for the fulfillment of certain needs
 the making up of tacit and manifested interpersonal conflicts
 the stabilizations and optimization of existent relationships and their transformation into a source of
continuous satisfaction
 the right understanding of the motivation of others and their usage for influencing their emotional state
and availability
 the efficient use of self emotions in favor of and not against the objectives that we might have
 the significant increase of communication impact

1.5. Steven J. Stein and Howard E. Book

The research on conceptual content in the 21 st century have brought about significant news, each year.
Steven J. Stein and Howard E. Book brought to attention a new organizational model under the form of
fields: intrapersonal, interpersonal, adaptability, stress management. Karl Albrecht made a
rearrangement of the model of Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences”, in other six primary categories:
abstract intelligence, social intelligence, practical intelligence, emotional intelligence,
aesthetic intelligence, kinaesthetic intelligence.
By combining thinking and feeling, emotional competency shows how much of that potential we
translated in the abilities that we have at the work place (in the classroom, theatre) Daniel Goleman (2004)
identified five dimensions within the practical model of EI competency: Self-knowledge, Self-
retrenchment, Motivation, Empathy, Relations.
Although 25 emotional competencies correspond to these five dimensions of emotional intelligence,
nobody has them all, but we can reach remarkable performances having approximately six of these, which
can be found in all the five fields of emotional intelligence: self knowledge, of our own emotions,
controlling emotion, internal motivation, empathy, establishing and managing inter-human
relationships.

2. Research Objectives
Our attempt to develop and make efficient the involvement of emotion in obtaining
individual success has as
objectives:
 The discovery of the four unique areas of EQ: self-knowledge, self-control, social-knowledge,
interpersonal relationships management
 The development of EQ by using some specific techniques
 The use of EQ for: having cognitive and interrelationship benefits, lowering the level of stress,
increase in individual productivity, understanding of emotions when they appear, positive interaction
with others, application in each area of our daily life.

3. Approach
3.1. General Hypothesis
The use of some adequate methods, techniques and strategies for developing emotional
intelligence will have as an effect the achievement of some relevant performances on a
cognitive, affective, interrelationship and self acceptance level.

3.2. Working Hypothesis

We can assume that there is a significant positive correlation between the emotional IQ
and the level of behavioral adequacy in certain situations.

3.3. Variable Description

The term of emotional intelligence refers to the abilities with which a person can discriminate and
monitorize his own emotions and other people’s emotions as well as the capacity of using the information
that guides his own thoughts and action. Two essential things are highlighted in this definition: involved
cognitive processes, as well as the processes by which his own emotions are monitorized apart from the ones
involved in monitorizing other people’s emotions. That is why it has been decided that it should be
operational through emotional IQ measured by “EI Self evaluation scale” which was elaborated starting
from the classification made by Stein and Book which includes 15 characteristics or emotional personal
competencies: emotional self knowledge, assertive character empathy, independence,
interpersonal relations, reality testing, problem solving, stress tolerance, impulses control,
optimism, happiness, self respect, self achievement, social responsibility and the Test
C.P.I.ad.383.
After the analyses of this self evaluation scale and the 5 dimensions S.P.A.C.E. of Albrecht, it was
decided to highlight the common elements of I.S. from the E.I elements from which only five have been
selected: empathy, social responsibility, interpersonal relations, assertive character, and
flexibility.
Several practical activities have been suggested which are based upon the principles of rational-
emotional and behavior education, which represents a psycho-educational program of preventive
intervention for children (in this case children with CES) made of modular sequences of psychological
education, which aims at the development of the children’s cognitive and behavior skills that can make them
more productive and at the same time happier and adapted into the hyper – complex environment that we
live in. The activities have been grouped into the following categories: self-acceptance, emotions,
beliefs and behaviors, problem solving and decision making, interpersonal relations.
Each activity contained two main parts: stimulation activity and discussion. The
duration of the activities was of 15-20 minutes for the stimulation activities and at least
15 minutes for discussions. The activities encouraged the pupils to look at each other, to
share and to learn from their colleagues what emotional adaptation means. The basic rules
set from the very beginning ensured the respect that pupils must have for other people’s
opinions and expressions. They have been forced to take part in the discussions. The
simple fact that they can listen to the other participants who chat and discuss has been a
learning experience which helped them bring their emotions and beliefs to a normal level.
The basic of this content of these types of activities were included in the
theoretical principles of REBT (Rational – Emotive Behavioral Therapy). The basic
assumption of REBT refers to the fact that emotional stress has its rules in four major
categories of irrational beliefs:
 Beliefs of the “to do experience”
 Worthlessness: I am a person without value who does not do very well and I do not win the
approval of others, as I should;
 “Expressing regrets”: it is awful, catastrophic and horrible that I do not manage as I should
 Beliefs of the type “I cannot handle it”(frustration, intolerance): I cannot tolerate it, I
cannot stand the things that are happening and that shouldn’t be happening to me
That must has been translated in the following types of belief, easy to track for anyone
who works with children or with CES children:
“I must receive what I want easily; the world must be just; it is awful that other
people do not like me; I cannot stand to be criticized; I cannot do anything to overcome
the state I am in; it is better to avoid challenges than to risk failure; I must conform to the
group; it is my parents’ fault that I am unhappy, everything must happen to me the way I
want it, and I always must have what I want, I must win, I shouldn’t wait to have
something; I am a bad person if I make a mistake.” (a child)

The nucleus of the REBT practice was the ABC model in which:
A represents the event that activated it, which can be interior or exterior to the
person who groups all the activities that can be observed or who imagined by the person
B represents the personal beliefs under the form of some evaluative cognitions or personal
representations on the reality which can be:
 Flexible beliefs (called rational beliefs) expressed under the form of desires and preferences which
lead to rational conclusions which are presented under the form of moderate evaluation of the
character of an event, of the expression of tolerance, the acceptance of imperfection, flexible thought
regarding the possibility of the occurrence of an event
 Rigid beliefs (also called irrational beliefs) which lead to irrational conclusions presented under
several forms: catastrophic thinking, intolerance, frustration, global negative evaluation, the thinking of
the type “always or never”
C represents emotional and behavioral consequences of the beliefs that the person has on
A:
 Dysfunctional negative consequences, which result from irrational, rigid beliefs on negative A-s,
will be inadequate
 Functional negative consequences (Crawford & Ellis, 1989) derive from action, flexible beliefs on
negative A-s.
Another category of consequences makes us think of the emotions associated with
an activator event:
dysfunctional negative emotions and functional negative emotions.

3.4. Sample Description

The research was made on a set of 64 subjects, 39 boys and 25 girls. The subjects were
between 10 and 14 yeas old and their selection was made from the number of students in a
neighborhood general school. According to age, the number of students represented ¼
from the total sample (10-11/16, 11-12/17, 12-13/16, 13-14/18).

3.5. Description of the Investigation Methods

As strategies, methods and exercises for evaluation, self evaluation and the
development of emotional intelligence, one has used:
 Self evaluation scale of EI which was elaborated starting from the classification made by Stein and
Book and the Test C.P.I.ad.383 adapted
 SmartEmotions Program for emotional Self control which created for the participants the right
conditions to develop their emotional “reading” capacity of those around them, hereby developing both
the correct observation and interpretation capacity of emotional reaction and the empathic resources of
deep connection to other people.
 ESPERE method whose objective aimed at “helping to the development of a different way of
relating to people, to life, in harmony with our deepest aspirations: wellbeing, peace, enthusiasm,
cohabitation and love.”
 The instruments of ESPERE method helped us built authentic relations, supporting the words used in
communication: “external visualizing”, “symbolic acts”, “update” and “confirmation”. The exercise of
passing from SAPPE to ESPERE meant for us passing from opposition/from being dominant to
confrontation, without alienating the Yellow narcissus principle and using the triangulation for breaking
through from duality.
 Methods with a high degree of interaction: the aquarium of impressions, role – plays (One-to-one
Play), practicing “report” (NLP), tests and questionnaires , case studies, Treasure hunting, Posters with
people, I can do, I cannot do, Emotions wheel, Express yourself, What is hidden inside?
 Relaxing methods: analytical relaxation method (Jacobson), Schultz autogenous and psychotron
training. Exercises of developing the knowledge capacity of self emotions (the list of emotions or
“emotional taxonomy”), of developing the capacity of correct emotions management, of developing the
empathic capacity.
 Techniques of increasing self-knowledge and emotional self-control
 Self-deception, a strategy of protection the opinion on himself by denying the weaknesses and avoiding
reality.
 Mind Lab method, a unique approach of the development of the thinking capacity, emotional
intelligence and social skills with the help of thinking games.

3.6 Description of the Data Collection Procedures

The investigation steps took 18 months and the testing of the subjects was made every 6
months. On each occasion, the approached problematic was presented, the trails, the
activities and the methods used have been described, the aim of the investigations and
they have been ensured of the confidentiality of the results to all the trials and in all
three evaluation steps. The subjects have been cooperative and they performed seriously.

4. Survey Results
The Pearson correlation coefficient, average, standard error and t test were used to
statistically process the data obtained after applying the tests.
The results obtained after applying and interpreting the “EI Self-evaluation scale”
revealed the capacities that obtained maximum values (independence, self–achievement,
optimism, social responsibility), the medium present capacities (interpersonal
relationships, self respect, happiness, solving problems) the least present capacities (stress
tolerance, impulse control, flexibility) and the capacities that were recorded (empathy -
26.38%, flexibility – 8.33%, impulses control – 8.33%, assertive character – 4.16%).
At the first analyses of the results after applying C.P.I.ad.383 we obtained the highest
frequency of critical scores in the case of psychological attributes like flexibility,
dominance, intellectual efficiency, communicability (62.4) and then it fell to a comfortable
level (32.6), proving the efficiency of the steps undertaken for developing emotional
intelligence.
Being made after each sequence of evaluation, the analysis of scholar results highlighted
the existence of both quantitative and progressive qualitative increase in 87.2% from the
cases.

The results obtained in Romanian and foreign language and literature, History,
Geography, and Civic education have been taken into account. The difference of at least
one point between the evaluations has proven the constancy of quantitative and qualitative
accumulations and those six cases where the progress was least noticeable have been
included into a special program to facilitate emotions development, self acceptance, the
efficiency of interrelationship. The statistic processing of the data has proven that there is
a direct, positive and significant correlation between the emotional intelligence coefficient
and dimensions of the personality at a significant step of p=0.01.
A positive direct correlation has been obtained between:
 the emotional intelligence coefficient and the development level of the communication dimension,
where the correlation coefficient r = 0.32 at a signification step p=0.05
 the emotional intelligence coefficient and the development level of the intellectual efficiency dimension,
where the correlation coefficient r=0.52, at a significance step p<0.001
 the emotional intelligence coefficient and the increase in individual productivity where the correlation
coefficient r=0.54 at a significance step of p<0.001,
all these results obtained demonstrate the validity of the Hypos=thesis 1 which says that
“The use of some adequate methods, techniques and strategies of developing emotional
intelligence will have as an effect the acquisition of some relevant performances on a
cognitive, affective, interrelation and self acceptance level.” All this had to be
demonstrated.
An emotionally intelligent person is not the one that has no emotions or the one that
does not express them, but the one that succeeds in subordinating their emotions to the
objectives they settled. Even though it might sound paradoxical, the most efficient method
of emotional self control is not suppressing emotions, but integrating them within the
interpretation process of reality and intentionally guiding their potential towards
those actions that produce constructive effects.
Compared with analytical intelligence or IQ which changes very little after adolescence,
emotional intelligence seems to be mostly learned and it continues to develop as we go
through life and we learn from experience. Our competency in this field can continue to
increase as we grow old and it can be improved through self-education.
By following the level of interpersonal relation, by comparing reaction times in given
situation, the degree of emotional self-control, the capacity of adjusting thoughts,
emotions and behavior to change situations and condition, stress tolerance, their
adaptability level and progress in time, we obtained: value index which demonstrates a
significant positive correlation between the emotional intelligence coefficient and the
level of behavioral adequacy in certain situations. This is what had to be demonstrated in
Hypothesis number 2.
Test t was used for independent samples to see if there is any difference between girls
and boys from the point of view of emotional intelligence. The difference was in favor of
the girls who obtained a medium score of 99.47, while the boys obtained 88.14. The
difference is not big enough to reach a significant statistic level – p=0.076 (t=1.782;
d.f.=73).
The average obtained for the level of the emotional intelligence coefficient of the whole
sample is 94.18 (minimum score = 20, maximum score = 160) and it indicates the fact that
tested subjects have an emotional intelligence coefficient slightly under average, which
suggests continuous training at an emotional intelligence level.

5. Conclusions
The steps undertaken have had as an effect the reaching the following psychological
objectives:
 the development of the capacity of identifying and recognizing own emotions;
 the development of the capacity of understanding the real causes of the occurrence of
emotions;
 the development of the capacity of knowing the significance of emotional states
according to the situations in which they are produced.
 controlling emotions of anger, rage and the tolerance of own frustration
 the expression of rage in a natural, appropriate, unaggressive way;
 stress management
 correctly recognizing the emotions transmitted by the people around them;
 the understanding of the people around
 reading nonverbal language which helps understanding communication
 acknowledging the causes of stress or other bad moods that one might be in at a certain
moment.

Besides the fact that all these offered a practical vision on the communication and
relation process, the specific instruments of applying communication and establishing
authentic relationships taught them to communicate, by locating and abandoning the
communication deficit around them and to stand up for their personal position, without
any guilt feelings or dominant attitudes. They established authentic, open and real
relationships and they learnt to meet and solve conflicts by consciously increasing their
personal efficiency through the coherent and strong development of their personality.

6. Recommendations
Reality shows that the people who have a good control of their emotions and who
efficiently deal with other people’s emotions have an advantage in any field of life and have
a great chance to be effective and pleased with their life.
Emotional intelligence is the power to act under pressure, the trust of having efficient
relationships, the courage to make decisions and the vision to create the future and it is in
a very strong relationship with leadership and creativity.
That is why it is necessary to implement a special program at the level of education
institutions to develop emotional intelligence as the research in this field demonstrates
that emotional intelligence is a more trustworthy predictor of success in life than IQ and
we also must keep in mind the fact that these two do not represent opposite competencies,
but separate ones, neither can act at its full capacity without the other.