Editor's Blog
Well we are talking about late night and early morning low clouds
With a chance of fog, chance of showers into the afternoon
With variable high cloudiness and gusty winds
Gusty winds at times around the corner of sunset and Alvarado
Yeah I know things are tough all over
— Tom Waits “Emotional Weather Report”
What is your emotional IQ (EIQ)? Emotional Intelligence — a concept made popular by psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman — is based on years of research by numerous scientists including Peter Salovey, John Meyer, Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, and Jack Block. AllPsych Online defines it as “The awareness of and ability to manage one’s emotions in a healthy and productive manner.” People with high emotional intelligence tend to be more “successful in life than those with lower EIQ even if their classical IQ is average.”
This is illustrated by the famous marshmallow experiment conducted by Stanford University’s Walter Mischel and discussed by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence. Here’s a video of the marshmallow experiment:
In the 1960s, a group of four-year olds were given a marshmallow and promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children could wait and others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence, and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
Now a study led by Jordan Grafman at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) in Bethesda, Maryland has isolated areas of the brain important for two types of emotional intelligence: experiential and strategic. As reported by New Scientist, Vietnam veterans with traumatic head injuries — depending upon the type of injury — were either deficient at experiential EIQ (“the capacity to judge emotions in other people”) or at strategic EIQ (“the ability to plan socially appropriate responses to situations”).
According to the research team’s web site, NINDS “conducts and supports research on traumatic brain injury to better understand the biological mechanisms of injury, to develop tools for improved diagnosis and classification, and to devise effective treatments to improve functional outcomes and quality of life.” NINDS areas of research include:
- Human observational studies to evaluate and characterize alterations in brain function and behavior,
- Pre-clinical studies to elucidate mechanisms of brain injury and repair, and to identify therapeutic targets, and
- Development of neuroimaging and other surrogate markers for diagnosis and evaluation of experimental treatments.
A study has isolated areas of the brain important for two types of emotional intelligence: experiential and strategic
Dr. Grafman’s team gave standard EIQ tests to 38 injured veterans along with 29 healthy control subjects. Seventeen of the veterans had injuries to their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and performed worse on experiential tasks while performing normally on strategic tasks. The 21 remaining injured veterans who had damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex did exactly the opposite — they performed worse on strategic tasks and better on experiential tasks. The traumatic brain injury sustained by the injured veterans did not appear to affect their cognitive abilities. Could there be a link between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, EIQ, and the ability to solve math problems and perform well on the SAT?
Dr. Mischel’s work with marshmallows at Stanford may offer clues. A recent New Yorker article points out that psychologists have long focused on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it comes to predicting success in life. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” says Dr. Mischel. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”
So, what is your emotional weather report? Try the EIQ test (see Resources), but be prepared to set aside 20 minutes or so to answer the 106 questions. Do you have an easy time overcoming difficulties in your life and controlling your mood? Are you able to motivate yourself to overcome obstacles (like resisting marshmallows) to reach your goals? Or is it just psychobabble? Judge for yourself.
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7 Comments
Interesting article, and . This experiment was covered in a Horizon special on the BBC, “Who Do You Want Your Child”, that would be of great interest to some readers of this very thought provoking website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jbppp
Will try the test soon… greetings from Italy.
The problem with research of this sort is that it doesn’t have any physical or logical basis for saying that emotions *in particular* are involved this kind of complex behavior rather than some combination of language, social relating, preference for sweets or some other factors. I mean, when you start correlating behaviors on a large scale, you will wind-up with *some* results that you can claim are meaningful – well, until such correlations collapse without showing causation, as has happen with so many pronouncements of psychology.
“Social adjustment” in any form is itself a slippery concept – thus you are explaining one complex phenomena with another; the weak point of conventional psychology in general.
Maybe, just maybe having a full-scale brain model of the brain could get us out of this kind of conundrum but even then, we’ll be deviled by wanting to putting values on what are often just behaviors.
You kind of skipped explaining the point of the test.
The kids who tried to “will” themselves not to eat the marshmallow ended up eating it. The kids who distracted themselves were the only ones who managed to get the reward. Basically, you have to leverage your exhaustible supply of willpower. If you use willpower to constantly fight the urge to eat the marshmallow you’re staring at you’ll quickly run out. On the other hand, if you use your willpower for a minute to come up with an activity that will give you something else to do, you won’t run out because you won’t be thinking about the marshmallow any more.
For example, kids who were successful crawled under the table and played, or turned their chair around and looked the other way, or even simply sat there with their hands over their eyes.
This is exactly the same sort of strategy that makes people successful in other areas of their lives. If you want to exercise more often you have to come up with something to take your attention off of the discomfort, like with music/TV/conversation. If you want to eat less you have to distract yourself from the change, like by forcing your family to join you, or pretending it’s for moral reasons, or getting interested in new foods. If you want to move to a better job you have to focus on what will help you advance, instead of Xbox, or drinking, or other profitless activities.
Thus, people who could do that as children spent a lot more time building up small successes and generally got further ahead than people who couldn’t do it younger.
I am not sure about when I was as young as 4, but certainly by kindergarten, I had the ability to assume there was a “catch” somewhere, and this enabled me to score higher on any sort of quiz at the primary or secondary school level than someone who wasn’t looking at the quiz from the perspective of how the teacher had designed it.
Once, in the 4th grade, all of the 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students were given the same test at the same time. I had already developed the habit of looking ahead or not plowing into a test immediately. The first instruction said to read the test before beginning. So, I did. The questions were somewhat amazing, telling the student to yell and jump and all sorts of silly things. The last question said simply to go back to the first page and sign your name at the top right and give the test back to the teacher, which I did. Apparently, I was the only one of all the grades to do so.
I am not so smart. Or, rather, I am probably in the top 5% but not the top 3%. But, I coasted for a long time on the ability to guess correctly what the teacher was looking for. This doesn’t work so well at higher levels of difficult subjects.
I probably would not have eaten the marshmellow, if only due to the fact that I can distract myself anytime anywhere, which leads to other problems — LOL.
oops! “marshmallow” ! LOL
I can remember being that young and I feel certain that the damn marshmallo is simply that. It is an object of desire. Your natural disposition and teaching as a child will tell the story. This carries on to make or break a person as an adult.
Kids shouldn’t be given marshmallows. Period.