Strategies for the College Classroom

Emotional Intelligence

Mayer and Salovey’s (1997) model of emotional intelligence identifies four mental abilities: perception of emotion, use of emotion to facilitate thought, understanding of emotion, and management of emotion. Perception of emotion refers to the ability to accurately perceive emotions in yourself and others by reading facial expressions, tone of voice and body language. “The ability to recognize one’s own emotions and identify how others are feeling requires attention to multiple internal and external cues and the analysis of both verbal and nonverbal communication in oneself and others” (Brackett & Katulak, 2007, p.7). Use of emotion to facilitate thought refers to the ability to use emotions to prioritize thinking as well as to think creatively. This ability allows us to make cognitive decisions that are guided by our understanding of the emotional impact of our actions. Understanding of emotion refers to the ability to associate emotional responses with the typical actions that are associated with them. For example, it is the understanding that anger is typically associated with aggressive actions. Management of emotions refers to the ability to regulate your own as well as other’s emotions in order to reach a specific goal. We will explore the idea of emotional regulation later in this chapter.

Emotional intelligence is viewed as a malleable rather than fixed trait, meaning that our level of emotional intelligence is able to increase with training. Emotional intelligence training focuses on recognizing, labeling, understanding, expressing and regulating emotions in response to situational and contextual cues (Brackett & Caruso, 2006).