Emotions and Your Relationships

Nothing affects a person like emotions. Whether those emotions are positive or negative, they can influence people in the most profound manner. For instance, some people have lost their jobs because they couldn’t control their emotions. When young people start dating, they will experience many kinds of emotions and it’s important that they learn how to handle these emotions. Emotional intelligence (EQ) can be described as a person’s ability to understand his or her own emotions. It also deals with how a person manages emotions in response to other people’s emotions. Usually, people with high EQ will be able to deal with people better.

Researchers have now defined five different domains of abilities involving interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences. Different aspects are measured to determine the level of a person’s emotional intelligence.

• To manage your emotions, you have to find the roots of your negative emotions in order to find the right ways to deal with them.
• To handle relationships positively, you have to know how to handle the emotions of people around you, putting your social skills to work.
• To enhance your self-awareness, you have to look at how adept you are at recognizing a feeling as it occurs.
• To raise your empathy, you need to be more sensitive to the emotions of others and truly, stand in their shoes. Acknowledge that people may have different feelings about things.
• To motivate yourself, you should exercise self control to the point that you can use your emotions to achieve your goals without succumbing to wild impulses or pleasures.

There are three terms that are constantly used in reference to emotional intelligence: affect, mood, and emotion. Affect refers to the experience of actually feeling an emotion. In other words, it’s the emotional feeling that is attached to a particular thought. Meanwhile, a mood is an actual state of feeling as in feeling something for an extended period of time, such as happiness or sadness. Finally, emotion is the feeling itself. All three of these things feed off of each other in a cycle. When people feel an emotion, they feel the affect of that emotion, and then that particular emotion puts them into a mood. Understanding each of these three things is crucial to having a high amount of emotional intelligence.

There have been many tests developed to determine a person’s emotional intelligence. The most recent and accurate is the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). This test takes around 45 minutes. Based on a person’s answers to a set of emotion-based questions, they can compile an accurate profile of the person’s emotional intelligence. There are other less accurate tests but most of them are highly subjective which means someone could take the same test twice and get different answers each time.

For some time, scientists have been striving to understand emotions using neuropsychology, which is the study of how the brain functions when specific psychological processes are going on. They study how the brain reacts when someone gets angry or sad or happy and try to find out if the brain is influencing those emotions. They also study emotions by using tests to try and link specific neurological processes to specific parts of the brain.

• Emotional Intelligence: Discusses emotional intelligence and provides tips on how to develop it.
• Family Tapestries: How to measure emotional intelligence and use it to make one’s life better.
• Emotional Processing: Discusses all the different aspects of emotional processing including emotional intelligence.
• Emotional Intelligence Tests: Examines the different aspects of emotional intelligence tests including the problems that people encounter with them.
• MSCEIT: Provides information on the MSCEIT, the test currently used to test a person’s emotional intelligence.
• Intrapersonal Intelligence: Has information about different kinds of intelligence including intrapersonal intelligence and this page talks a bit more specifically about it.
• Affect, Mood And Emotions: Discusses moods, emotions, and other things that impact a person’s emotional health.
• Neuropsychology: Touches on neuropsychology and how emotion ties into it. A page of resources related to understanding neuropsychology can be found here.

The need to understand emotions is indispensable. To live a better life, it’s a good idea to improve your emotional intelligence.