Yolanda U. Trapp
One of the best selling books of 1995 was Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. This book, which galvanized popular sentiments that some form of intelligence beyond academic knowledge and cognitive problem-solving capacity is essential to success in life, represents a broader trend toward examining the personal attributes and skills that link academic intelligence and success in school, work, and interpersonal relationships.
Goleman defines personal talents as aptitudes that are primarily intrapersonal and enable one to take constructive action with respect to both people and task. Personal talents include affective processes and aptitudes and connative processes and aptitudes, such as volition and self-regulation. These two correlated sets of abilities help an individual develop self-awareness, capitalize on personal strengths, minimize personal weaknesses, make effective life decisions and set and achieve goals.
Individuals have different levels of these personal abilities, just as they have different levels of intellectual, artistic, or musical abilities. Individuals with high levels of personal talent are often found among the ranks of the eminent. A key finding of Benjamin Bloom's study of world-class experts in several talent fields was that, as children and adolescents, these individuals set goals for themselves and practiced long hours to achieve those goals.13 Talented adolescents are also distinguished by their capacity for consistent and intense concentration on academic tasks, athletic events, and musical performance. Bloom also describes eminent achievers as combining great emotional acuity and technical excellent in their activities, which suggests that "emotional intelligence" was integral to their success. Many distinguished writers have the emotional intelligence necessary to rebound from early losses and to express their personal pain and conflict through the creation of great literature. Achievement appear to be extraordinary in their ability to focus their attention, sustain their works efforts, and use their creative efforts as a vehicle for emotional expression.
According to Goleman, emotional and connative components or personal talent are closely related. For example, emotional information is key to decision making, which is essential for self-regulation and goal attainment. Similarly, connative processes are crucial to the development of skills in affect regulation.
John Mayer and Peter Salovey define emotional intelligence as the "ability to monitor one's own others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one's thinking and actions".14 They have developed a hierarchical, cognitive model of emotional intelligence that includes four components, listed from the simplest to the most complex:
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1. Perception, appraisal, and expression of emotion;
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2. Emotional support for thinking;
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3. Understanding and analyzing emotions and applying emotional knowledge; and
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4. Reflecting regulation of emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.
Occupations that require emotional intelligence include psychotherapy, social work, teaching, creative writing, and organizational leadership. Emotional intelligence also predicts positive relationships and work histories. However, research on emotional intelligence is still in its infancy, and work is under way to develop a scale to measure the four levels of Mayer and Salovey's Model of Emotional Intelligence.
Even less attention has been given to emotional processes in education, although that may be changing. For example, for a couple of years there have been created several projects like "Project Charlie" that provides direct training for social and emotional learning. This program was designed to build basic skills in personal and social talents in the general New Haven school population.
