Introduction

Marsha Linehan’s dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) in 1993 and Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence in 1995 significantly advanced psychology. Dr. Linehan formulated a new cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) for borderline personality disorder, and Dr. Goleman presented a structural outline of highly functional human behavior. Although the two psychologists came from two different philosophical directions, the former clinical and the latter global, their overlapping findings give us a vocabulary for describing mental health skills.

Dictionary definitions of mental health include meeting thresholds of self-acceptance, positive regard for others, and social functioning. Emotional intelligence and DBT go beyond dictionaries with operational definitions of mental health components.

Together, emotional intelligence and DBT each have five skill areas for a total of ten.

Emotional intelligence:

1. Self-awareness
2. Self-regulation
3. Motivation
4. Empathy
5. Socialization

Dialectical behavior therapy:

1. Dialectical thinking
2. Mindfulness
3. Emotional regulation
4. Distress tolerance
5. Interpersonal effectiveness

Below I introduce emotional intelligence and its five skills sets. Dialectical behavior therapy and its skills sets follow in another post.

Emotional Intelligence ((A proper introduction with an in-depth understanding of emotional intelligence is best left to Goleman’s publications and talks. My intent is to provide an outline along with highlights that speak to me.))

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize emotions in yourself and in others and then use that knowledge to enhance your life and your communities.

Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, is a monumental achievement. The book is one of the few found in both my hardcopy and virtual libraries. The  information is so dense that I have read the book three times. If you are a mental health professional or a layperson who wants to be an increasingly effective human being, Dr. Goleman’s book is essential. Here are the five components:

1. Self-awareness

Self-awareness has three abilities:

1. Acknowledging our different emotions
2. Recognizing what causes them
3. Accepting them, i.e., not judging ourselves negatively for having them.

Here is one dictionary definition of emotion: a conscious mental reaction (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object [person or situation] and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. ((“emotion.” 2022. In Merriam-Webster.com. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emotion. (Author’s addition in brackets) ))

Emotions are complex, and what we call a particular emotion is just the most prominent one mixed up with others. For this reason “emotional episodes” may be more descriptive than “emotions.” Emotional episodes evolved as templates of behavior over evolutionary time to aid animals and us to increase the odds of survival by reacting without thinking. The quality of self-awareness asks us to change without thinking to with thinking.

Here is a list of basic emotional episodes common to people in all cultures: ((This is only one of several lists of emotions that philosophers and scientists have proposed. All such lists are controversial. Nevertheless, this is one that I find the most useful in the clinical setting.))

1. Fear
2. Anger
3. Sadness
4. Joy
5. Disgust
6. Surprise
7. Embarrassment
8. Shame
9. Guilt
10. Pride of accomplishment

2. Self-regulation

Regulating emotional experiences means accepting the experiences and then behaving in an informed way to modulate them. When we can name an emotional experience, we can feed it or starve it by our actions and inactions.

Evolution by natural selection (EBNS) has resulted in a numerous evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs). Some of these are urges accompanied by mental and physical discomfort, sometimes extreme, if not acted on. Some EPMs such as an exaggerated fear of spiders or the urge to eat stale food rather than throw it away are silly. Other EPMs, such as the urge to take one’s own life when jilted by a lover or to go to war over national pride, are tragic.

Some common characteristics of emotional episodes:

• They have either an approach valence or an avoidance valence. Often, to our consternation, both valences operate simultaneously.
• They exist in a temporal context that may be eons old.
• They are about our beliefs and about our interactions with the environment.
• They can be occasions of great learning.
• They are our first response to challenges that violate our expectations.

Obstacles to self-regulation of emotional episodes

• Emotional episodes cannot be quickly turned off by will power. If they could, they would be useless.
• Emotional episodes are complex.
• Emotional episodes are like icebergs: They operate in the unconscious long before awareness.
• As a consequence of evolution by natural selection, an emotional episode can be in full operation before cognitive controls kick in.
• Our expectations are often based on a desire for coherence of belief rather than the truth.

Strategies for self-regulation of emotional episodes

• The regulation of emotional episodes is to prevent escalation of the episodes and not to stop them in their tracks.
• Live life daily in synchrony with your circadian rhythm.
• I referenced will power in the above bullet list. Although will power cannot turn off an emotional experience, it can be part of a preventive strategy limiting escalation, e.g., anger need not become rage.
• Engineer your life to reduce nasty surprises and to maximize joyful surprises.
• Know the valence of your emotional episodes and act oppositely. For example, anger is an approach emotion. When you feel angry, withdraw from the focus of the anger and observe the larger picture. Sadness is an avoidance emotion. When you feel sad, embrace the focus of the pain.
• Foster expectations of life based on accepting reality.

3. Internal Motivation

Internal motivation is the ability to act consistently in the best interests of yourself and of your communities even if your actions may be unpopular. Internal motivation is not deliberately contrarian; it is informed by foresight, the ability to see the beneficial effects of present behavior in the future.

Internal motivation is a skill set consciously sought after and built on a widely based experiential and academic learning. Acquiring and maintaining internal motivation is an active process.

Internal motivation is not closing yourself off from the voices of others. It means acting in accord with all the data available to you including knowledge received from others. In my view of emotional intelligence, internal motivation requires us to be a citizens of our communities. Cult leaders and their followers may have internal motivation to exploit the common good for their selfish purposes, but that brand of motivation is not emotional intelligence.

Motivation and self-regulation rely on each other.

4. Empathy

Empathy consists of two pieces: (a) the prosocial ability to recognize and distinguish emotional episodes in other people and (b) the ability to recognize how other people’s current situations relate to their emotional episodes.

A note on language: English in all its varieties has a confusing vocabulary around empathy. A few examples are sympathy, compassion, and empathic concern. Then there are the adjectives empathetic and empathic. I will leave it to linguists to sort through the semantics and the varieties of national English and ESL, and I will use empathy as defined above.

Empathy and morality

I subscribe to the school that empathy is the source of morality defined secularly.  Empathy is also the source of ethics. Societal institutions such as governments and religions are corrupted by relying only on persons with economic and political power for financing. The result is that governments often forego their Lockean duties to secure basic human rights for all its citizens. Similarly, followers of religion sometimes substitute professed beliefs and solidarity practices for the entirety of a moral code.

Empathy and forgiveness

I do not subscribe to the school that forgiveness is something to attain at all costs. Forgiveness, however, is a wonderful experience, and we should be open to it finding us. I have been able to forgive others when I have realized their capabilities had been taxed by the extraordinary demands often placed on them precisely because of those capabilities.

5. Socialization

We demonstrate socialization by contributing ideas to the conversation, by managing teams, and by working through conflicts. Ultimately, socialization is getting along with others and is the ultimate test of emotional intelligence. We prepare ourselves for socialization by cultivating self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, and empathy.

Contributing to the conversation

• Intelligently. We learn to distinguish details; learn to distinguish important from unimportant detail; learn to focus on the important and set aside the unimportant; learn to compare and contrast; and finally learn to rank order.
• Humbly. We may or may not be the smartest person in the room. The smartest person is rarely smart enough, anyway. All ideas stimulate other ideas until a viable plan emerges given the resources and time constraints.
• Generously: Knowledge is power: Give it away. Mentor others and let the credit go to them. Adam Grant details how doing so allows your communities to prosper and you along with them.

Managing teams

Managing teams is about letting the members work for each other and for you as a leader. Most humans are more motivated by peer relationships than by causes. Treating all the members of the team as fellow humans will contribute to repeated successes over time. I admire the principle of Stoic philosophy that teaches us to live each moment as a gift to ourselves and to others rather than focusing primarily on outcomes. Outcomes matter but they are secondary to each team member’s individual humanity.

Working through conflicts

Because evolution by natural selection (EBNS) has resulted in humans being easily inclined to intrasexual competition, conflicts are inevitable. Emotionally intelligent people utilize self-awareness to check their own urges to compete unnecessarily, and they utilize empathy to recognize urges in others to compete unnecessarily. Emotionally intelligent people are skilled in emotional regulation and in deescalating techniques when unnecessary urges to compete are felt.

Endnote

Thank you for reading this post. If you are new to the details of emotional intelligence, even this little introduction may require a repeated reading. I have read Goleman’s book three times (as mentioned above) and discovered new insights each time. I wonder how many more await me on another reading. I very much welcome your comments. Another post will follow soon on dialectical behavior therapy.

Best regards,

Dr. Michael DeCaria

(The featured image is of a nearly full Moon rising over the the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Photograph by the author.)