How Feelings Make Us Smarter

Some people are remarkably good at reading the emotional temperature of a situation. They can pick up on what others are feeling, manage their own emotions, and respond skillfully. What's their secret? This week, we explore the science of emotional intelligence with psychologist Peter Salovey.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In October 1967, the world's greatest chess minds gathered in Sousse, Tunisia, to face off at the interzonal tournament, the high-stakes gateway to the World Chess Championship.

• 0:16Shankar Vedantam?

  The early games were dominated by the American prodigy Bobby Fischer. He was a 24-year-old grandmaster with an IQ rumored to be at the genius level of 180. He was the favorite to win it all.

• 0:33Shankar Vedantam?

  But despite his overwhelming lead, the tournament quickly spiraled into a masterclass in self-sabotage.

• 0:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Bobby Fischer issued a series of escalating demands regarding his playing schedule. When organizers refused to rearrange the event to suit him, he walked out, withdrawing from the tournament while in first place, and throwing away years of work in a single fit of frustration.

• 1:01Shankar Vedantam?

  The walkout was a window into a profound emotional ineptness that lived right alongside Bobby Fischer's brilliance.

• 1:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Throughout his career, he operated in a state of constant relational friction, alienating the very coaches and friends who tried to support him. At his chess matches, he frequently violated the social norms of the game, arriving late and refusing to make eye contact with the player sitting across from him.

• 1:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Bobby Fischer possessed a mind that could see a dozen moves ahead on a chessboard, but he struggled with the basic moves of social and emotional life.

• 1:39Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, the logic of emotion and how feelings make us smarter.

• 1:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 2:25Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:58Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Think back to the last time you made a decision you regretted. Perhaps you felt blinded by rage or paralyzed by fear. In those moments, it feels like our emotions are obstacles to our success, a vestige of our primitive brains getting in the way of our rational minds. But research in recent decades into the world of emotions suggests that this idea is profoundly wrong. Emotions are central to our ability to understand, attend, and to prioritize. They aren't obstacles that block our path. They are food and fuel for the journey. Peter Salovey is a psychologist at Yale University. He studies how our emotions shape our decisions and our behavior.

• 4:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter Salovey, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Shankar. It's a real honor to be with you. I listen to your show regularly and have enjoyed seeing you live as well. And so it's a privilege to be a guest.

• 4:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter, in addition to being a psychology professor at Yale, you've held several administrative posts at the university, including provost and dean. While you were dean, a prominent individual visited the campus. Can you paint me a picture of the moment you got to shake hands with the president?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yes, we had invited President Clinton to visit campus. And if memory serves, he was going to give a talk on campus at the time. And they lined all of us up, all the deans, in the boardroom, actually, of the university. And you were around the perimeter, and President Clinton walked in.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  And he worked his way around the perimeter of the room, shaking hands with everyone. And when he got to me, I was quite nervous, actually. And he stuck out his hands and he said, "I'm Bill Clinton." And I said, "I'm Peter Salovey. I'm the dean of Yale College." And he said, "You know, it's a pleasure to meet you, Peter. We actually already know each other."

• 5:48Shankar Vedantam?

  So when he said that you had met earlier, had you actually met him earlier, Peter?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  No, I had never met him, at least, you know, not to my memory. But no, I had never met him. I had never met him. And so I was surprised when he said that. And of course, I was a little nervous, like, "Am I... I forget that I had met Bill Clinton? How could that possibly be?" So I'm a little self-conscious in my interaction at that point.

• 6:21Shankar Vedantam?

  So something happened earlier that day that is pertinent to what Bill Clinton told you. Tell me what happened earlier that morning, Peter.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as I was coming on campus, really to park near where this meet-and-greet was going to take place, I saw a spot, and I pulled in quickly. And I didn't realize it, but I had pulled right in front of Bill Clinton's limo. And in fact, kind of cut it off. And a Secret Service agent, or some kind of security that was with him, jumped out of the car and said, "Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait." And President Clinton rolled the window down and said, "No, no, no, no, it's okay. That guy's the dean." And I realized he had been reviewing the people he was going to meet,

• 7:12Speaker 01

  in his car, most likely, as a public figure might. And so when I was in the meet-and-greet line to meet him, he said to me, "We already know each other." And I was so charmed by this. And more importantly, he could tell I was nervous. He could tell I was anxious, meeting the president.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And he told that story to sort of say, "There's no need to be nervous, Mr. Dean. We're old friends. We had an interaction earlier today." It put me at ease. It was a wonderful example of President Clinton managing my emotions. He can see I'm nervous. No need to be nervous. We're old friends, he says. And in fact, the old friend is based on an embarrassing interaction, but that doesn't matter.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  I've seen photographs of the moment. He's looking me in the eye and giving me a firm handshake. And it's that, when he's looking at me, he is seeing that I have a look of nervousness or fear, anxiety in my face.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  And it cues him to do something, which is tell this story about the interaction with him and his limo and the Secret Service, because he knows it might put me at ease, or at least make us feel familiar and like old, old friends.

• 8:54Shankar Vedantam?

  What Peter realized after the fact was that Bill Clinton had demonstrated an essential idea in Peter's own research. Some people are incredibly skilled at reading a room. In interactions with others, this gives them an edge. They can see around the corners of a conversation, soothe frictions, put people at ease. Some years after this incident, Peter became a president himself. He became president of Yale. He inherited a challenge that required the same skills of him that Bill Clinton had shown in that interaction.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  We had a residential college named for John C. Calhoun. It's called Calhoun College. John C. Calhoun was a senator, was the vice president of the United States, all before the Civil War. Served as, I think, secretary of state and secretary of war as well. But what he was most well-known for is his ardent defense of slavery. Slavery not just as a, quote, "way of life in the South," but, to use his words, "as a positive good." He believed, and he rooted it in white supremacy.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  He viewed it as the proper order of society.

• 10:17Shankar Vedantam?

  And I imagine he must have gone to Yale himself if a building was named after him.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, he'd been vice president of the United States. He was a Yale graduate. And when the building was built in about 1930, there was a debate about who to name it for. And there were two colleges being named that year. And they named one of the colleges after a minister. And so the other was to be named after the most prominent statesman, who at the time would have been John C. Calhoun. So with that as history, over the years, many decades, there had been more and less protest about this name.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Why do we name a college after the most ardent defender of slavery? And so I, in some ways, tired of receiving petitions about this or watching protests. I said, "Let's have a conversation." And I gave my welcoming speech that fall. And I said, "Let's have the kind of conversations you should have on campus about whether we should continue to have a college named for John C. Calhoun." And I made the argument that good people, moral people, thoughtful people, would likely

• 11:43Speaker 01

  find themselves on both sides of this issue. Some wanting change, some saying, "We don't need to honor John C. Calhoun," and others saying, "We may not agree with John C. Calhoun, but he's a public figure, a historic figure, and universities should not be in the business of effacing history."

• 12:14Shankar Vedantam?

  So early on, as this controversy was brewing, you decided that the name should not be changed. Talk about the moment you actually announced this to the campus and what the reaction was, Peter.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Sure. While our students generally wanted the name to be changed, our alumni did not. And our faculty at that point were largely not interested in this particular issue. And I talked to many experts, the head of the NAACP, prominent African-American intellectuals who had lived in Calhoun College when they were Yale undergraduates, and many, many others. And all of them were profoundly ambivalent about the idea of effacing history. "We should leave his name on there," many of them said, "but confront him in other

• 13:11Speaker 01

  ways." And so in light of that, I had announced that we would maintain the name, but we would contextualize it. We would put up educational materials, plaques and the like, explaining who he was and what he believed, and why we left his name on the college.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think the next day, after announcing that decision, there was very loud protest on campus, led by students. We had a town hall meeting at which I spoke, and now the faculty were quite energized by the issue. I think, seeing how upset the students were, they were then calling for a different outcome.

• 14:00Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that during the town hall, there was a moment when students were showering you with fake cash to make the assertion that you cared more about, you know, donors and the alumni than the well-being of students. And that must have come as something of a shock to you.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  That, of course, was a shock to me. You know, I was a very student-oriented president. I taught students introductory psychology for many, many, many years. And so I was not happy about that, that kind of protest. Several months later, in the summer, a worker in Calhoun College, I believe he was a dining hall worker, noticed that the iconography, the symbolism, the windows, stained glass windows in Calhoun College, reflected themes relevant to the name. They reflected the Old South, African-Americans picking cotton. John C.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Calhoun is kind of a statesman-looking regal. And he, in a kind of emotional moment, he broke one of these stained glass windows, I believe it was the one of the African-Americans picking cotton. And he said that, "As a black man, I couldn't stand looking at that every day. And I needed to do something."

• 15:40Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, Peter, as you heard about all this protest and you saw how intense the feelings were, did you have a moment when you felt that you had, in some ways, misjudged the intensity, the depth of feelings that existed on campus about this issue?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yes. And I think part of that was that times were changing. This was all happening in a dynamic environment. It was happening in real time. And I think when we began this conversation, sure, students wanted change. But many other people, quite reasonably, made the argument that effacing history was not appropriate. I think views shifted over the course of that year. And in the course of grappling with my own feelings about that, I met with an African-American

• 16:38Speaker 01

  student who grew up in South Carolina. In fact, she grew up, I believe, in a home just off of Calhoun Street in Charleston. This student said to me something very interesting. She said, "I've known the name of Calhoun all my life. I know who he is. I can handle being in a space named for John C. Calhoun, such as Calhoun College. But I don't want to live in a shrine to slavery." And I said, "That's a powerful metaphor. What do you mean by that?" She goes, "Look at the stained glass windows.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Look at the reliefs carved into the stone walls. Look at the artifacts from plantations in the South that are in the collection of this college. Look at the name that is on our T-shirts when we go out and play intramural sports. This has become a shrine to slavery." And I swallowed hard. And I had a moment of emotional understanding and deep empathy that the debate really wasn't

• 18:01Speaker 01

  entirely about, "Do you honor figures from the past, even if we completely disavow their viewpoints now?" Or whether you efface history? Or whether times change and who we honor should change? It suddenly got focused on how people feel. Thinking about that student living in a shrine to slavery, thinking about our worker

• 18:34Speaker 01

  so moved to an act of vandalism, that he risked his job, he risked criminal prosecution. It was a shift in my thinking. And it was really a processing of those emotions, triggered by my interaction with the student primarily, that created a moment of clarity for me and suggested that we needed to consider an alternative path.

• 19:14Shankar Vedantam?

  What did you end up doing?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  We ended up changing the name. The name of that college is Grace Hopper College, named after an early computer scientist, I think before the field had even been invented, and a Navy admiral. But we honored her service and being one of the early founders of the field. She had gotten her PhD in mathematics at Yale. But it was really this moment of insight created by the arousal of empathy, following an emotional conversation with a student, that set me, anyway, on a different course in my thinking.

• 20:07Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the most consequential challenges we face in daily life is to read what is happening in the emotional lives of other people.

• 20:15Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how the ability to read the emotional undercurrents in a room can transform our lives.

• 20:23Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 20:38Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 21:10Shankar Vedantam?

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• 21:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 22:05Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Schools and universities often test students on their knowledge of complex material.

• 22:16Shankar Vedantam?

  In the workplace, employees are promoted because of their expertise and problem-solving skills.

• 22:23Shankar Vedantam?

  We've all heard of geniuses who produce great works of literature or magnificent musical compositions. But dig a layer deeper, and you find that some of the smartest people are not very smart when it comes to gauging the emotional temperature of a situation.

• 22:40Shankar Vedantam?

  When they meet someone new, they find it hard to tell friend from foe. They are unaware of the emotional undercurrent swirling around them, and they often behave like bulls in china shops.

• 22:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter Salovey is a psychologist at Yale University. He studies how our emotions shape our decisions and our behavior.

• 23:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter, your research tackles a longstanding belief of Western culture that thinking and feeling are opposing forces in the mind. Talk a moment about the long history of that idea.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Yes, whether you're looking at Stoic philosophers, or many religious traditions and the like, the idea is that we shouldn't be ruled by our passions. Rule your feelings, or your feelings will rule you, is kind of the idea. That on the one hand, we have thought and reason, and on the other, we have emotions, passions. The belief was somehow that our emotions were vestigial, meaning, yes, they're part of our animal heritage, just like our wisdom teeth, just like our appendices, but we don't really need them anymore. We are a thinking species.

• 24:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter and a colleague, Jack Mayer, noticed there were all kinds of situations where people are asked to read the emotional temperature of a situation. Some people are better at doing this than others. Wasn't this a kind of intelligence, too, they wondered? Together, they came up with a formulation for the skill they were talking about. They called it emotional intelligence. The idea came to them in the oddest of places: not a lab, but as the two were painting Peter's living room.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is what happened. And we're painting the living room, we're talking about emotions, we're talking about intelligence. We both had done research on the impact of mood and emotion on memory, on judgment, on decision-making. And we were just chatting as we painted. Jack was very nice to help me paint my living room. We'd only been friends a year or two at that point. And talked about this idea of emotional intelligence. My original idea was, let's develop a framework for organizing all of these abilities having to do with the emotions and their effect on thinking and behavior. Jack came out of a more traditional intelligence laboratory, but had now turned his attention

• 25:17Speaker 01

  to mood and emotion. And he was wondering whether you could measure any of this. And so we came together in that way, yes, and it was while painting my house.

• 25:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter and his colleagues have found ways to measure emotional intelligence. Instead of asking people about their emotional skills, people turn out to be poor judges of their own emotional intelligence, the researchers came up with a series of tests. How good were people at reading the expressions of others? How well did they understand what was happening in their own emotional lives? How skillful were they at regulating their emotions? They came up with a measure, very much like an IQ test. It came to be called the Mayer-Salovey-Cruzos scale, or MESQI, for short.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  We did a study in which you came to the lab as a participant in research and had to interact with a stranger.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And then the stranger would rate how well did you listen to him? How connected were you trying to be with him? How empathic did you seem? And for our participants who scored well on the MESQI, the stranger rated them more highly. But also, we could show videos of that interaction to others, who had no idea, of course, what the experiment really was about. And they rated the person as more sociable, better able to make friends, and the like,

• 27:05Speaker 01

  if they had higher scores. We could also do just correlational studies. How many friends do you have? It's predicted by the MESQI, by our emotional intelligence measure. Do you engage in pro-social behaviors with friends? Are you more likely to help, to share? Or are you more likely to get into arguments and fights? All of it predicted by emotional intelligence. So I'm sure everyone listening knows of someone who everyone wants to be their friend, because they listen well, they empathize, they reflect feelings, they seem to be able to pick up on something about you that many others don't.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  And they seem to be able to kind of walk a mile in your shoes. And not surprisingly, they are the kinds of individuals who you would love to have as a friend.

• 28:10Shankar Vedantam?

  You've also looked at how emotional intelligence makes a difference in other realms of life. Young people who are more emotionally intelligent tend to be less likely to engage in risky behaviors. Why do you think this might be the case, Peter?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. We've shown correlations between MESQI scores and the likelihood of using drugs or alcohol, particularly in adolescents. Higher scores on the MESQI predict less likelihood of drug or alcohol use, less likelihood of delinquent behavior. I think some of it is, if you're more in touch with your own emotions, you don't need,

• 28:56Speaker 01

  what would I say, illicit substances to help you regulate them. You're less likely to need to self-medicate. Similarly, if you're better able to empathize, better able to understand the emotions of another person, you're less likely to have conflict with them, less likely to think the way to settle differences is through fighting.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Maybe most importantly, you're more likely, as a kid, to stay in school, because you like school and you like learning better. So I think it's all of a piece, right? You're happier in the school environment, more likely to make friends, less likely to become frustrated, drop out, more likely to not self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. When you get older, it's all of a piece.

• 29:46Shankar Vedantam?

  And this is not just when you are looking at the behavior of students and young people. You find emotional intelligence plays a role in our work lives.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  For sure. One small study we did was at an insurance company where we measured traditional intelligence. We measured personality and we also gave them a SKI, our measure of emotional intelligence. And what we predicted a time later were the performance reviews you received from your boss and whether you were likely to get a promotion and how big a raise that you received at work. But the emotional intelligence test that we used, the SKI, was a good predictor of those kinds of workplace outcomes. People who are better able to regulate their own emotions were at a huge advantage in the workplace.

• 30:41Shankar Vedantam?

  You've written and talked quite a bit about what an emotionally intelligent manager looks like, Peter. What are the qualities of individuals in the workplace? And what are they able to do in their interactions with others?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  So the emotionally intelligent manager, they recognize what might be going on in a situation beyond what people are simply saying. They recognize that somebody might be saying one thing but feeling another and that that needs to be explored in depth. But I could tell you a story. In early days, David Caruso and I were doing some training at a large investment bank. And this was before the Great Recession. And this was a bank that was quite affected by the Great Recession.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And these were essentially vice presidents and senior vice presidents engaged in banking, engaged in trading, engaged in providing investment advice and the like. And only 10% of them or so were going to be promoted to their ultimate goal, which was to become a managing director, which is where much more serious compensation is received. And so we would ask at the beginning of our conversations, at the beginning of our sessions, how many of you feel that you are above average in IQ? And every hand would go up.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Then we'd say, how many of you feel that you have strong analytic or mathematical or economics skills for your jobs? And every hand would go up. We'd look at them and say, I don't understand. You all are above average in IQ. You all feel you have the analytic and economic and mathematical skills to do your job. And yet, 90% of you are not going to get to be managing directors. What is that all about?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  And they would say, well, I guess some people are better able at inspiring others. Some people are better able to manage their own emotions. Some people are better able to manage a group's emotions. Some people are more charismatic. And they'd start to generate what it meant to be an emotionally intelligent person in that context and recognizing that that was the differentiator, not the analytic skills. Everybody was smart.

• 33:27Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand, Peter, that some research has also employed brain scanning to study the brain activity of people as they solve emotion-related problems?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  In the study that you're referring to, we asked people to solve problems that were social in nature, problems about conflict with others and the like. And maybe the most important aspect of that work is it has seriously challenged the idea that cognition and emotion are separate. You can see in fMRI scans that the parts of the brain thought to be involved in emotion and the parts of the brain thought to be involved in thinking, in decision-making, in problem-solving, in creativity are closely connected, that there's dense

• 34:21Speaker 01

  and multiple connections among them. And that when you activate what we would think of as a strictly cognitive activity, you're also activating the emotion side of things. You also can study people with different kinds of brain damage, people who've had strokes, for example. And if those strokes affect the emotional parts of the brain, they also have an impact on their thinking.

• 34:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Emotions provide us with useful information, crucial data points that we can use to inform our responses and our decisions. Yet people vary widely in their ability to identify, understand, and manage emotional signals. Is this capacity innate and fixed or an ability we can cultivate?

• 35:17Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to sharpen our emotional intelligence? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 35:40Shankar Vedantam?

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• 37:07Shankar Vedantam?

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• 37:16Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had times in your life when you or someone you know handled a situation with exquisite emotional intelligence? Or can you think of a moment when you were, well, an emotional idiot?

• 37:34Shankar Vedantam?

  If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "emotional intelligence." Again, that's [email protected].

• 37:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter Salovey is a psychologist at Yale University. He studies how our emotions shape our decisions and our behavior.

• 38:08Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter, researchers have developed a program intended to help people increase their emotional intelligence. It's called Ruler. I understand this is an acronym. What does it stand for?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  So Ruler is an acronym developed by Mark Brackett, who's a professor here at Yale in the Child Study Center, happened to have been my postdoc and my collaborator, Jack Mayer's graduate student, years and years ago. And Ruler is an acronym for the skills that he and his colleagues teach kids from kindergarten through high school to become more emotionally intelligent human beings. The first R is recognizing emotion, the ability to know what you're feeling, know what another person is feeling, to recognize emotions through nonverbal cues or verbal ones. The U is understanding emotion.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  What does this emotion mean? How does it transition in time? How does it progress? How do small emotions like irritation turn into big ones like rage? How does it affect our thinking and our behavior? What does it motivate us to do? The L is labeling emotions. Can I use words to describe this emotion to others? Can I reflect someone's feeling back to them using words? Can I identify where emotion words might fit into an emotion space defined by pleasant and unpleasant dimension and an active versus calm dimension?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Most emotions and feeling states can be mapped onto those dimensions. The E is expressing emotion. What am I showing on my face when I express an emotion? How do I modulate those expressions when I am in different settings, at work versus at home, at a funeral versus at a party?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Am I aware of cultural differences in the way emotions are expressed? It's another part of all of this. Do I understand that in certain cultures, weeping openly is perfectly acceptable and in others, a more stoic attitude is expected? Or that expressing great joy at one's accomplishment might be perfectly acceptable in America, but a little embarrassing in a place like Japan?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  The final R is regulating emotion. And this is the area of emotional intelligence that has received the most research attention. A wonderful researcher named James Gross, for example, at Stanford University, who is studying the way in which we manage our emotions, primarily through cognition, for decades and decades. And regulating our emotion, we need to remember, we're regulating our emotion, but we also want to regulate the emotions of others sometimes. Why might I want to cheer myself up? Well, perhaps because I'm going to do something creative. Why might I want to calm myself down, actually feel less happy?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Well, because I might have a task in front of me where I need to be vigilant and careful and slow. For example, proofreading a manuscript. What about others? When I give a talk, why might I want to tell a joke at the beginning of that talk? To manage other people's, regulate other people's emotions before they have to listen to me. So Ruler is recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating. And it forms five kinds of skills that you might want to teach to schoolchildren as they learn about their emotions.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  And it more or less maps on to the four domains that the Mesquite, which is our ability-based emotion test, measures. We organize them slightly differently than Ruler, but you can see the overlap very clearly.

• 42:34Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that when people ask you how they might improve their own emotional intelligence, you have a couple of practical suggestions for them. And one sounds like advice from an English teacher, which is to read good literature. Why would, why would reading help us increase our emotional intelligence, Peter?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Well, it is an interesting question because one of the things we know is that your emotional intelligence can be improved. It's one of the reasons people love the concept of emotional intelligence is because unlike IQ, which is kind of difficult to change very much after you're a teenager, you can improve your emotional intelligence over the course of your lifetime. Merely aging and gaining life experience typically improves your emotional intelligence, kind of amazing that way. Now, the difference in terms of how we would go about improving our intelligence, our emotional intelligence, concerns whether we're talking about kids or adults.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  For kids, teaching these skills directly in the classroom as part of a social emotional learning program is probably a pretty effective and efficient way to, to learn these skills. It's a little more difficult as adults to take a class in emotional intelligence. And so we have to look for other, other ways to do it. I believe, I don't have a lot of data on which to base this, but I believe that's where the arts can really help us. So imagine that when we're reading great literature and trying to understand the motives of characters and why someone is behaving as they are, why they might behave in ways that look conflicted.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  All of that helps us develop a more sophisticated understanding of emotions, a greater ability to recognize emotions and label them and maybe even manage them. I think having experiences where you're looking at visual art, looking at, let's say, at paintings in an art museum and reacting to them emotionally might, might help. In Santander, Spain, there is an entire museum organized, art museum, organized around the idea of emotions and creativity, using the art museum experience to practice your emotions.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  I think listening to music is a great way to practice feeling emotions that you might not feel that often in, in the outside world. I particularly like theater. And when I was in high school, I was an actor. And I often think theater is a wonderful way, because you're watching behavior, to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to feel an emotion and how it's connected to thinking and behavior. You know, in method acting, one of the techniques you might use to create an emotion is actually to enact the behaviors associated with that emotion. And then that emotion might follow.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Act as if crying and crying might follow. Well, having those kind of experiences either as an observer or actually being on stage yourself might help, help you learn, develop a more sophisticated understanding of how our emotions work and how they're connected to behavior and cognition.

• 46:08Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I'm thinking about the times when we go to a gym and we start working with, you know, different equipment. And all of a sudden, you realize that you had muscles that you didn't know that you had because your body starts to ache and pain in different places. And in some ways, what you're talking about emotions is actually not that different, that in some ways, the more we exercise our emotional repertoire, the more we discover that we have emotional recesses almost that we haven't really explored that are worth exploring and strengthening.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right, Shankar. And the more you do it, the better you develop these skills so that empathizing becomes natural, so that recognizing emotions in someone who is saying something different than their feeling becomes more second nature, so that you develop over time muscles that allow you to take advantage of the data that is inherent in our emotional system. And it becomes, I don't want to sound too woo-woo here, but it becomes kind of like a sixth sense. Yes, we see and we hear and we taste and we smell and we touch. But we also feel our emotions.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And maybe there's some data there that, that is being conveyed to us that we should pay attention to. Why is it that I'm thinking about, well, let's say, purchasing a product, but I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach that's a little queasy? Shouldn't I stop and think about why that product made me feel that way? Why is it that I might find myself attracted to another person? And, and that's accompanied with joy versus it's accompanied by a little bit of worry? What does that tell me? What does that tell me? And so for the most part, people go through life ignoring all of that.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  And what I'm suggesting is, these are data. And when you ask a friend, let's say, or spouse or family member to role play something with you, tomorrow I'm going to go ask my boss for a raise. When you role play it, you learn how expressing certain words creates certain feelings in you. You learn when your feelings are maybe going to push you in directions you don't want to go. And you can practice modulating those feelings. You can practice regulating them. You can practice taking a deep breath, pausing, giving yourself a minute to calm down and then continuing on.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Our whole conception of emotional intelligence is that these are skills. You use the metaphor muscle. You can think of these as skills, just like an athletic skill, where, you know, when you develop those muscles and you take thousands and thousands of foul shots from the basketball foul line, you get better at them. The same is true when you role play emotionally evocative situations. What can I learn from watching the way my body responds, my thoughts change and my feelings are expressed and have an impact on others?

• 49:47Shankar Vedantam?

  The idea of emotional intelligence isn't new. In fact, you might say it's one of the most popular terms in all of psychology. Managers, parents, teachers, all preach the importance of emotional intelligence. Sadly, however, a lot of what you may have heard about this concept is wrong. In our companion story to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we explore how the enormous popularity of emotional intelligence has spawned a number of myths and misguided notions. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled "Emotional Intelligence Isn't About Being Nice."

• 50:29Shankar Vedantam?

  If you're not yet a subscriber, please visit support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber-only content, including past episodes. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co/hiddenbrain. Peter Salovey is a psychologist at Yale University. Along with Jack Mayer, he helped coin the concept of emotional intelligence. Peter has written and co-written several books about emotional intelligence, including "The Emotionally Intelligent Manager: How to Develop and Use the Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership."

• 51:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Peter, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Thank you, Shankar. It was a delight for me, and I very much enjoyed our conversation, and I truly enjoy your show.

• 51:31Shankar Vedantam?

  If you have a personal story about emotional intelligence that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about the research in this episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at [email protected] using the subject line "emotional intelligence." Again, that's [email protected]. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kurell, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Special thanks today to Simon Lindstedt. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

• 52:16Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 52:42Speaker 02

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