Emotional Intelligence and Human Relationship

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIP

Psychology 1 A -- Sin Ieng Mou

INTRODUCTION

‘‘Emotions are brought into play most often by the actions of others, and, once aroused, emotions influence the course of interpersonal transactions’’ (Ekman & Davidson, 1994, p. 139).

Emotions, being characterized as one of the most cardinal role in a coordination of human interactions, can utterly enhance or destroy a relationship among people in this universe. If people want to enhance the quality of a relationship, the crucial determinant lies on whether their emotions can be processed as optimally as possible (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). Through continuously making observations of people in my daily life, my curiosity has been elicited toward the correlation between emotional intelligence and the way how people get along with each other, in particular, what significant influence emotional intelligence has on people's ways of dealing conflicts and resolving problems, thus help contributing to harmonious relationships among them.

Whenever my parents come to a quarrel, my mum, who usually bursts out in the very first minute, annoys everyone in the room. Contrarily, my dad can always stay calm in attempting to compromise with my mum in his best way. At first, I automatically attribute the reason of this big discrepancy in dealing conflicts to my dad's distinct educational background from my mum. However, learning psychology for a whole semester made me realize the ultimate reason of their difference could be far more complex than this. When my sister failed her mathematics test in which she was supposed to score high, my mum directly assumed that she was being lazy and not having studied hard enough for her test. Guess what was the action of my father? My caring father came to my sister and had a talk with her. He wondered if my sister was being baffled by any problem so that she could not perform well in her test. Through these two observations, I was intrigued by one of the most argumentative topic that continues to proliferate among psychologists -- Emotional Intelligence. Why some of the people can always be aware of the emotions of both his own self and the others in order to make a next compromising move which is mutually beneficial to both of the individuals? And why my father could put himself in the shoes of others so he did not blame my sister for having a bad result in her mathematics test? It is all about whether the individual is truly emotionally intelligent.

HISTORY ABOUT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

The first academic usage and appearance of the term "emotional intelligence" can be traced back to a doctoral dissertation written by Wayne Leon Payne, a graduate student at an alternative liberal arts college in the USA in 1985. Then in 1990 the work of