Emotional Intelligence

"Emotional intelligence" is the innate potential to feel, use, communicate, recognize, remember, describe, identify, learn from, manage, understand and explain emotions". (S.Hein)


And a more formal definition is:

We define EI as the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

Emotional intelligence involves certain abilities that describes four areas of capacities and skills :

1- Perceiving Emotions: which is the most basic area that deals with nonverbal reception and expression of emotions.

Thus, the capacity to accurately perceive emotions  of others provides a crucial starting point for more advanced understanding of emotions.

2- Using Emtions: The ability of emotions to promote and facilitate thinking. Having a good system of emotional input,

therefore, should helped direct thinking toward matters that are truly important

3- Understanding Emotions: . Emotions convey information: for example happiness  indicates a desire to be with others while anger indicates a desire to attack or harm others. Once a person can identify such emotions or actions, the capacity to reason those emotional messages and actions becomes important.  So Fully understanding emotions, in other words, involves the comprehension of the meaning of emotions, coupled with the capacity to reason about those meanings.

4- Managing Emotions: Emotions can be managed. A person needs to understand emotions convey information: That is a person voluntarily wants to remain open to the emotional signals that cause him to be relaxes and comfortable but blocks those that are bad or overwhelming.