Emotional intelligence is the ability to 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.  

-  Mayer & Salovey, 1997

The model posits four abilities:

Accurately perceive or identify emotions

Generate emotions to facilitate thought

Understand emotions

Manage emotions

PERCEIVE EMOTION

Definition

Perceiving or Identifying Emotions – the ability to correctly identify how people are feeling, or to identify emotional content in objects, art, music, etc. 

Description

Perceiving Emotions score concerns the ability to recognize how you and those around you are feeling.  The first branch of the emotional intelligence model involves the capacity to perceive feelings accurately. Emotional perception involves paying attention to, and accurately decoding, emotional signals in facial expressions, tone of voice, or artistic expressions. 

Accurate appraisal of emotions starts with attending to emotional expressions.  If a person is uncomfortable with other’s expression of negative emotions, for instance, and they turn away every time they sense another’s discomfort, they may not perceive accurately that other person’s emotional state.  

FACILITATE THOUGHT

Definition

Using Emotions to Facilitate Thought – the ability to generate emotion, and then reason with this emotion. 

Description

Facilitating Thought is the ability which allows you to employ your feelings to enhance the cognitive system (thinking) and, as such, can be harnessed for more effective problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and creative endeavors.  Of course, cognition can be disrupted by emotions, such as anxiety and fear, but emotions also can prioritize the cognitive system to attend to what is important and even focus on what it does best in a given mood.

Emotions also change the way we think, creating positive thoughts when a person is happy, and negative when the person is sad.  These changes in viewpoint force us to view things from different perspectives.  Such shifting viewpoints may foster creative thinking.    

UNDERSTAND EMOTION

Definition

Understanding Emotions - the ability to understand complex emotions and emotional "chains", how emotions transition from one stage to another.

Description

Emotions form a rich and complexly interrelated symbol set, and many people discuss the existence of an “emotional language”.  The Understanding Emotions Branch reflects being able to label emotions and to reason with them in an effective understandable level. 

Understanding what leads to various emotions is a critical component of emotional intelligence.  For instance, annoyance and irritation can lead to rage if the cause of the irritation continues and intensifies.  Knowledge of how emotions combine and change over time is important in our dealings with other people and in enhancing our self understanding.

MANAGE EMOTION

Definition

Managing Emotions - the ability which allows you to manage emotions in your self and in others.

Description

Your Managing Emotions score concerns one’s capacity to manage emotions successfully, when appropriate.  This concerns the fourth branch of the Emotional Intelligence model.  Managing emotions means that you remain open to emotional information at important times, or closed to it at other times.  It means successfully managing and coping with emotions.  It also means working with feelings in a judicious way, rather than acting on them without thinking.  For example, reacting out of anger can be effective in the short-run, but anger which is channeled and directed may be more effective in the long-run.  

It is important to understand that the ability to successfully manage emotions often entails the awareness, acceptance, and use of emotions in problem solving.  When we speak of emotional regulation, some people understand the term to mean that we are seeking to repress emotion, or to rationalize emotion.  Managing Emotions involves the participation of emotions in thought, and to allow thought to include emotions. Optimal levels of emotional regulation likely will neither minimize nor exaggerate emotion.