ABSTRACT
Mayer (this issue), along with his colleague, Salovey, has for several years been de veloping the concept o f emotional intelligence (El). £7 is the ability to perceive and express emotion, to assimilate emotion in thought, to understand and reason with emotion, and to regulate emotion in self and others (Mayer, Caruso, & Salovey, 1999). Psychologists who study emotion should be indebted to Mayer and Salovey for demonstrating that emotion and reason are not only not incompatible with each other, but also that emotion may facilitate cognitive functioning. Their work on El fortified my own thinking about the intellectual underpinnings o f spiritual intelli gence. The concept o f El has become popularized and marketed by the establish ment over the past few years so that it barely resembles the original formulation. However, to the credit o f Mayer and his colleagues, they have continued to do the painstaking work of determining whether El actually meets the accepted criteria for an intelligence, and developing innovative, performance-based measures o f El.
