By Howard Gardner
Quite often I am confused with the individuals who created the phrase “emotional intelligence” (researchers Peter Salovey and John Mayer) or with the author who made it world famous (Daniel Goleman). But ordinarily I don’t use the phrase emotional intelligence myself.
This article (click here for link) caught my attention because of the claim that emotional intelligence contributes significantly to academic success. Accordingly, in contemplating this research, I thought about its relation to two forms of intelligence that I identified in the early 1980s.
It should come as no surprise that individuals with high emotional intelligence are ones who can understand the feelings of others, build strong relationships with others, help them, and be themselves helped by peers as well as by teachers or other persons. These are all signs of interpersonal intelligence But I was also pleased to learn that individuals who display emotional intelligence are able to engage with their own psychological states—boredom, anger, anxiety—and to deal with them effectively. In my “MI” lexicon, these latter capacities fall under the rubric of intrapersonal intelligence.
When I originally wrote about the then seven intelligences, I devoted a separate chapter to each of them—linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, and bodily-kinesthetic. But I deliberately treated both interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence in one chapter. And here was my reasoning. It’s possible to be stronger in one kind of personal intelligence than in another—but in all probability, there is a closer tie between the two personal intelligences than any other pair of intelligences.
Read the full article here: https://www.inverse.com/article/61671-emotional-intelligence-is-key-factor-for-success.