What is Emotional Intelligence?

Abstract

The original UNH webpage about emotional intelligence was among the first online and publicly available sources of responsible information about emotional intelligence. Here, in revised form, is an introduction to the theory of emotional intelligence with additional commentary on its measurement. The following document represents a reconstruction and update of the earlier UNH Emotional Intelligence site and information that was available on it. The reconstruction includes all the major essays and e-mail exchanges with colleagues about the theory that were relevant to emotional intelligence. As we transferred the material to the present website, it was lightly edited. The edits were limited to: Ensure all links were properly updated or proplerly referenced in APA style Correct typographical and orthographical mistakes in the earlier texts. Replace tables that had been formatted originally in HTML with formatting in MS Word (from which PDFs were made). During those edits, some tables were clarified or, if overly long, shortened to focus on what was important. For example, the tables reflecting types of data in the Measuring Emotional Intelligence section were updated and, in some instances, revised into bulleted lists; also, the table that included examples of hypothetical individuals who were low in personal intelligence was shortened to include fewer examples. The multiple individual posts on the original website were combined into the PDFs below. The first-level headings in the documents generally correspond to the names of the individual pages on the original website, with small exceptions.