What Is Emotional Intelligence

A working definition

Emotional intelligence is the ability to notice emotions — your own and other people's — understand what they are telling you, and use that information to guide behaviour. The term entered mainstream psychology in 1990, when Peter Salovey and John Mayer published the first formal model, and reached the wider world through Daniel Goleman's 1995 book. Where IQ asks how well you process abstractions, EQ asks how well you process feelings.

Ability or personality trait?

Researchers distinguish two traditions. Ability models treat EQ as a measurable skill — can you correctly identify an emotion in a face, a sentence, a piece of music? Mixed models fold in personality characteristics like persistence and warmth. The disagreement matters: an ability can be trained, while a trait mostly describes your starting point.

One popular misconception

EQ is not niceness. A skilled negotiator who reads your frustration and uses it is deploying emotional intelligence — the framework says nothing about kindness. Ethics come from the person, not the score.