ABSTRACT
Introduction Why are some individuals ‘good with people’ – by which I mean able to identify their emotional state, work out the right thing to say and demonstrate social awareness? Likewise, why do some people fly into passionate rages and appear to be at the mercy of their emotions, while others seem to be able to understand and manage their feelings? Being sensitive to one’s own and others’ emotional states is known as ‘emotional intelligence’. It has long been recognized that general intelligence, g, as described in Chapter 8, may not be the only thing that affects people’s performance (e.g. at work) and some mention of this was made as early as the 1920s (Thorndike 1920). However, the first real experimental studies of emotional intelligence took place in the late 1980s when researchers such as Salovey and Mayer (1990) reviewed the literature and started to develop a more detailed model of how the concept of emotional intelligence should look.
