GETTING SMART ABOUT EMOTIONS
excerpt from Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books, 1995
by Daniel Goleman
To the degree you want to assess someone’s intellectual prospects – who will excel as a
mathematician, for example, or as legal scholar – IQ is a crucial measure. But, given people of
average IQ, if you want to predict who would be the best manager, teacher or political leader,
there’s another kind of intelligence to consider.
This other way of being “smart” also helps you predict which fourth-grade girl will most likely
be pregnant by high school, or which second-grade boy will be most prone to violence as a
teenager. This more critical gauge is called “emotional intelligence” and roughly includes the
ability to control impulses, soothe anxiety, calm anger; to focus on goals and persevere in the
face of setbacks; and to empathize and interact with others harmoniously.
Educators, long disturbed by school children’s lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing
that there is a different and more alarming deficiency emerging: emotional illiteracy. A new
kind of toxicity is seeping into the very experience of childhood, putting children on the track
toward a range of problems. Grade school boys who are highly impulsive, always getting into
trouble with the teacher, for example, are three to six times more likely than self-disciplined
children to engage in violent behavior by the time they are teens, according to several
psychological studies. Girls with similar attributes, one study found, are three times more likely
to become pregnant as teens. And grade school girls who cannot tell the difference between
anger, anxiety, boredom and hunger are more at risk of developing eating disorders as they grow
older, studies have found.
Too often, the symptoms of low emotional intelligence can be deadly. Many in New York still
remember the cold-blooded violence that erupted in a Brooklyn high school three years ago. It
began as a small dispute between friends, but soon escalated. Ian Moore, a senior at Thomas
Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, and Tyrone Sinkler, a junior, had a falling out with a buddy
over a gold bracelet. Soon they started picking on their friend, Khalil Sumpter. Scared and
angry that Ian and Tyrone were going to beat him up, Khalil brought a .38 caliber pistol to school
one morning and, 15 feet from a security guard, shot both boys to death at point-blank range.
Such incidents are becoming ever more common among teenagers, a sad fact underscored by a
recent Justice Department report that predicts the number of young people arrested for violent
crimes will double over the next 15 years to more than 260,000 annually. Compared with adults,
teen violence is twice as likely to be between acquaintances, according to the report, and guns
are the weapon of choice 1 in 10 times. One in four young murder victims is killed by another
youth.
The murders of Ian and Tyrone, chilling as they are, are a poignant sign of the need among
children for lessons in handling emotions, settling disagreements and developing the basic skills
to cope with everyday life. The signs go way beyond violence to include a tripling over the last
three decades of rates for suicide and venereal disease among teens and a doubling for forcible
rape; and sharp climbs in the rates of depression and eating disorders. To a degree, these
problems affect children of all incomes, but its manifestations are particularly bleak among
African-American youth in the inner city. For example, heroin and cocaine use among white
juveniles tripled in the two decades before the 1990s but jumped a staggering 13 times for
African-American youth.
These alarming statistics are like the canary in the coal-miner’s tunnel warning of too little
oxygen. Among the most revealing findings are those of researcher Thomas Achenbach, who
compared the emotional condition of two representative national samples of more than 2,000
American children. He studied one group in the mid-1970s and the other at the end of the 1980s.
Achenbach, a psychologist at the University of Vermont, asked parents and teachers to rate
children they knew well, and found there was a steady worsening of children’s emotional
abilities. No one problem stood out; all simply crept in the wrong direction. Children, on
average, were more withdrawn and lonely, feeling generally unhappy; they were more anxious,
depressed and fearful; they had more difficulty paying attention and thinking, were more
impulsive, distractable, day-dreamy and prone to act without thinking. And, the study found,
they were more hot-tempered and aggressive, more prone to trouble-making, lying and cheating,
more argumentative, disobedient and destructive.
While there may be some small comfort for middle-class parents in thinking of this as a problem
of beleaguered urban neighborhoods, the Achenbach study found growing emotional deficits
even among children from the country’s most affluent suburbs. Although initial scores
understandably were worst for the poorest children, the rate of deterioration was the same for all
children, privileged and impoverished alike.
There is no single cause of this deterioration. Likely candidates range from the sheer number of
hours children now spend alone staring at a computer screen or television, and so not playing
with their friends, to the numbers of parents so stretched by their work lives that they can’t spend
the time with their children that their parents spent with them.
As David Polugruto, a high school physics teacher in affluent Coral Springs, FL can testify, these
problems affect even the brightest and most privileged. Polugruto was stabbed in the collarbone
with a butcher knife by a straight-A student enraged that he had received a “B” on his physics
quiz.
Unfortunately, these emotional deficiencies are rarely addressed in the standard school
curriculum. One Brooklyn teacher says the present emphasis in schools suggests “we care more
about how well school children can read and write than whether they’ll be alive next week.” Yet
the sharp drop in children’s emotional intelligence is in many ways a more troubling social trend
than any dip in SAT scores.
But the trend need not be downward; kids can learn emotional intelligence – if we make the
effort to teach them. A handful of pioneering schools have started courses that teach the basics
of emotional intelligence, just as they teach math. In one junior high class in Brooklyn, for
example, students think of a single realistic step, no matter how small, that might have helped
settle some conflict they have had. Third-graders in Seattle talk over how it feels to be left out of
a game, and what they might do constructively to become included.
Fourth-graders in New Haven have a regular class in key emotional skills like naming their
feelings and distinguishing between them, and recognizing emotions from facial expressions.
Perhaps most important of all these emotional lessons are those in impulse control, now taught
throughout the New Haven schools: Students learn that when they are on the verge of an
emotional outburst, they should first calm down, think of a variety of responses and their
consequences, and then try the best one.
The results so far are encouraging, even in settings like New Haven’s trouble-plagued Hillhouse
High School, where more than 90 percent of students are African-American and drug dealers
sometimes ply their trade in the streets surrounding the school. Only one in two entering 9th
graders stays on to graduate – most drop out, but some don’t live through their senior year. Last
year’s seniors had 7 shooting deaths among their classmates.
Since the emotional literacy program started, “there’s been a tremendous improvement in the
behavior of students,” says Lonnie Garris, Jr., the principal. “They’re less apt to fight over
something like getting bumped in the hall, they’re more receptive to following school rules,
they’re more focused. There are far fewer suspensions.”
Comparison data from other emotional literacy programs shows that students become better at
tolerating frustration and managing their anger appropriately; they handle stress and anxiety
better; they become less impulsive and better able to concentrate; they grow more cooperative
and better behaved. No one would claim that any such course is enough to transform the
economics and culture of neighborhoods where children born to unwed teenagers see dealing
drugs as the readiest road to wealth, and violence as a necessity for survival. But bolstering
emotional intelligence amounts to an inoculation against social viruses that won’t soon
disappear.
Emotional literacy is not values education; there’s no grappling with moral conundrums in these
classes. Nor is it a rebirth of the 1970s-style “encounter group” where reckless emotional
catharsis wreaked havoc. Instead there is instruction in restraint of impulse and in appropriate
emotional expression. And emotional literacy gives muscle and meaning to the sometimes
feckless units, from AIDS prevention to conflict resolution, it unifies and replaces.
These courses make explicit what has always been an implicit role for schools: socializing our
young. It means, in effect, methodically giving students greater wherewithal for a fourth “R” –
Responsibility. This expanded vision of what schools do may resonate in a day when calls for
personal responsibility ring ever louder.
I’m reminded of a recent incident outside a Manhattan rap club, where, in a crowd of milling
teenagers, an inadvertent bump ultimately led to a youngster wounding 8 others with a .38
caliber handgun. Some say the answer to such incidents is to put more police on the streets,
some say there should be fewer guns floating around; both have merit. But there is something
else we can also try that just might make our nation’s children less likely to need policing in the
first place: improve their emotional intelligence. Consider this. Whom would you rather bump
into, a bright-but-angry-and-impulsive-15-year-old with a gun or a not-very-bright,-but-easygoing-15-year-old with one? If you ask me, I’d rather have fewer volatile, impulsive teenagers
running around, no matter how smart they are.
FUNDAMENTALS OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Self-awareness: Self-awareness is essential to psychological insight; it is a faculty that most
psychotherapy strengthens. Some of us are naturally more attuned to the symbolic modes of the
emotional mind: Metaphor and simile, along with poetry; song, and fable, are cast in the
language of the heart. So, too, are dreams and myths – Joseph Campbell said, “Myths are public
dreams; dreams are private myths.” – in which loose associations determine the flow of
narrative, abiding by the logic of the emotions. This inner attunement is to the wisdom of the
unconscious, the felt meanings of our dreams and fantasies, the symbols that embody our deepest
wishes. Those who can so attune themselves to their own heart’s voice – the language of
emotion – are sure to be more adapt in articulating its messages.
Mindfulness is the quality of attention that takes in whatever passes through awareness with
impartiality; as an interested yet unreactive witness; this mode of sustained self-awareness is
taught in Eastern disciplines. It bears similarity to the psychoanalytic notion of the “observing
ego,” which allows the analyst to monitor his or her own reactions to what the patient is saying.
At its best, minfulness allows a calm awareness of passionate or turbulent feelings; at a
minimum, it manifests itself simply as a slight stepping-back from experience, being with what is
happening rather than being lost in it. Self-awareness is the fundamental emotional competence
on which others, like emotional self-control, build.
Handling emotions: A sense of self-mastery, of being able to withstand emotional storms, has
been praised as a virtue since the time of Plato. The ancient Greek word for it was sophrosyne,
care and intelligence in conducting one’s life, a tempered balance. The Romans and early
Christian Church called it temperantia, temperance, the restraining of emotional excess.
The goal is not to suppress emotions; a life without emotion would be a wasteland of neutrality,
isolated from the richness of life itself. What is wanted is appropriate emotion, feeling that is
proportional to circumstance. When emotions are too muted, they create dullness and distance;
when out of control and persistent, they become pathological – as in immobilizing depression,
overwhelming anxiety, raging anger, manic agitation.
Keeping our distressing emotions in check is the key to emotional well-being; distressing
feelings that wax too intensely or for too long undermine our stability. Much of what we do,
especially in our free time, is an attempt to manage our moods. Everything from reading a novel
or watching television to the activities and companions we chose can be ways to make ourselves
feel better. The art of soothing ourselves is one of the most basic of all psychic tools.
Self-motivation: To the degree that our emotions get in the way of or enhance our ability to
think and plan, to solve problems and the like, they define the limits of our capacity to use our
innate mental abilities, and so determine how we do in life. And to the degree we are motivated
by feelings of enthusiasm and pleasure in what we do – or even by an optimal degree of anxiety
– they propel us to accomplishment. Impulse control is perhaps the essence of emotional selfregulation: the ability to delay gratification in the service of a goal, from writing a book to
solving an algebraic equation to pursuing the Stanley Cup.
Putting off gratification, regulating our moods so they facilitate rather than impede thinking,
motivating ourselves to try and try again in the face of setbacks, or finding ways to enter a
“flow” state and so perform more effectively – all bespeak the power of well-channeled emotion
to guide effective effort.
Empathy: Rapport, the root of caring, stems from emotional attunement and the capacity for
empathy. The ability to sense how someone else feels comes into play in a vast array of
situations, from sales and management to romance and parenting to compassion and social
action. The absence of empathy is also telling: the trait is lacking in criminal sociopaths, rapists,
and child molesters.
People’s emotions are rarely put into words; more often they are expressed through other cues.
The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels: tone of
voice, gesture, facial expression, and the like. When words disagree with one of these channels,
the emotional truth is in how something is said rather than in what is said. One rule of thumb
used in communications research is that 90 percent or more of an emotional message is nonverbal. And such messages – sensing anxiety in someone’s tone of voice, irritation in the
quickness of a gesture – are almost always taken in unconsciously; without paying specific
attention to the nature of the verbal message.
Empathy is the single human quality that leads us to override self interest and act with
compassion and altruism.
Social skills: Handling someone else’s emotions – the art of relationships – requires the ripeness
of two other emotional skils, self-management and empathy. With this base, the “people skills”
ripen. These are the social competencies that make for effectiveness in dealings with others;
deficits here lead to ineptitude in the social world or to repeated disasters. The lack of these
skills can cause even the intellectually brightest to come off as arrogant, obnoxious, or
insensitive in relationships.
These abilities allow one to shape a social encounter, to mobilize and inspire others, to thrive in
intimate relationships, to put others at ease. While there are many ways to conceive of social
competence, one of the more succinct is in terms of expressivity, sensitivity, and selfpresentation.
We are always sending emotional signals, and those signals affect those we are with; social skills
allow us to manage this emotional exchange. “Popular” and “charming” are terms we use for
people we like to be with because their emotional qualities make us feel good. People who are
able to help others soothe their feelings have an especially valued social commodity; they are the
souls to whom others turn when in greatest emotional need. We are all part of one another’s tool
kit for emotional change, for better or for worse.