What is Emotional Intelligence (EI)?
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to perceive emotions and 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). When I partnered with Dr. Salovey, the Dean of Yale College, and his colleagues, to publish and distribute the earlier version of their Emotional Intelligence assessment, they asked me to help them make their model accessible to people outside of psychology. They wanted me to help others to use this new knowledge in a way that was beneficial and practical. To begin making their model more accessible I created a more user friendly working definition that reflected their intent but is much easier to understand and work with. Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, use, understand and manage emotions (Wolfe, 1999). I presented this definition at the first European conference on Emotional Intelligence
