Talk:Emotional intelligence

Criticism section

Shouldn't the topic on "Nancy Gibbs on emotional intelligence" be moved to the criticism section? Or, perhaps there should be a History section. here is a history with input from many of the leaders in the field. Or, here is a history from an interview with Daniel Goleman.

Article should be called Emotions and Intelligence

Emotional intelligence does not appear to be one thing, but rather it appears to be a combination of three things. Personality, General overall cognitive ability (IQ), specific socially oriented cognitive ability (Theory of mind). Coatchecker

Nope, the subject actually is "Emotional Intelligence" .. which in it's current form could almost be considered some type of holistic mental therapy that liberally incorporates random scientific facts to make it appear more authentic. Apparently a dynamic EQ was originally propose to be "the answer" to offset the fixed potentials of IQ to cash in on the stigmatic limelight surrounding 'The Bell Curve' (a hot topic at the time). I might go as far as to call EI a pseudoscience, but there is quite a few factual academic studies in the field. Although the peer reviewed journals in no way over glorify "emotional intelligence" in such an exaggerated manner as the New York Times bestseller that shares the same name. If anything the scholars have spent more time cleaning up the mess that Goleman made than making actual progress in this area. These views are my opinions. Anyways, the title is correct, the information does seem to be an odd amalgamation, but as one might say, "that is the nature of the beast." 74.97.109.162

Clean up

Hi, I'm trying to clean up this page.

It's the first time I've tried to clean up a wikipedia page, so have patience with me. It's just that there are a lot of areas that really need to be clarified, just on a grammatical / sentence-structure level. As someone familiar into EI, I'm also adding a bit of info here are there, although I'm trying to do this in separate entries. Chime in if there are any objections. -Kerrjac

--Ok, now I think that most of the article reads pretty well & objectively. I had edits for just about every section. Most of them were grammatical / styllistic bits (e.g., putting terms in italics rather than quotes), with a bunch of new internal links (among others, reliability, mediation, regression, confound, self-report, case study, social desirability). Most content changes were in the assessment / criticism section: For the former I rearranged the order, to take the emphasis off of the commercial scales, and also added info on the Schutte inventory; and for the latter, I further clarified the comparison to IQ, and I created a new section for criticism against Mayer. I also temporarly took out that section on neural circuits (see my note in text, I think the info doesn't below in the criticism section).

Perhaps we can take off the 'needs cleanup' tag in a few days. I think we just have to make sure that the reference section is updated with the content. We might also want to elaborate on some of the the information a bit, particularly the assessment area.

-Kerrjac

re: objective cleanup

I've changed those opening 2 ppgh's. There's such a variety of models of EI that it's difficult to talk about them all in one breath. I see how the words "this has left" is too negative. I also tried to change in to sound less like EI researchers are defending their construct, however it should be remembered that in a sense, whenever a new construct is introduced, it does need to be defended. And one way to defend it is by establishing such criteria.

As a "fan" of EI myself, so to speak, I was also surprised that the criticism section was so long. I thought a lot of the criticisms needed to modified, but I tried not to change too much material. However, I've read much of the scientific literature (especially regarding Mayer & Salovey's model), and the skepticism portrayed here really is reflected in the literature. EI does have a lot more speculative and unempirical articles, even within the scientific publications, than most constructs I've come across; its lack of empirical evidence has been critisized heavily. I would argue that downplaying the vast amount of skepticism would be unhealthy for the future growth of the construct.

Regarding Goleman, nothing in the article states that he's the "author of EI". I don't think that he is. In fact, it might even be worth it to elaborate on Goleman in the section, "Claims for the Predictive Power of Emotional Intelligence are too Extreme", because his references that EQ has more predictive power than intelligence have been heavily bombarded by scientists. I think I even heard that he published a correction on this statement.

But if you disagree, feel free to suggest / add more modifications.

One possibility would be to distinguish different models of EI more, and then elaborate on their pro's & con's within subsection. You can see that most of the criticisms are only aimed at specific models. However, I only have sufficient knowledge to do this for Mayer's model, I wouldn't be able parse the info for other models.