Thursday, May 27, 2010

Elephant Journal - Feelings of Intense Fear & Happiness: More Is Better for Emotional Intelligence

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My most recent article for Elephant Journal - Feelings of Intense Fear & Happiness: More Is Better for Emotional Intelligence - looks at emotional intelligence - and some new research that suggests that the more intensely we have experienced fear and happiness, the better we are able to identify emotions in others.
I want to look at a new piece of research that focuses on the first branch of emotional intelligence, recognition or perception of emotions.

PLoS ONE, an open source science publisher, recently posted new research from Tony W. Buchanan, David Bibas, and Ralph Adolphs that looked at how previous emotional experience impacts the ability to recognize emotions in others. The assumption has existed that the more emotional experience a person has (emotional intelligence), the more likely they would be to see and correctly perceive emotions in others. This is the first study to demonstrate that this is true.

Our study demonstrates for the first time that in the general population emotional experience in real life is reliably associated with the ability to recognize happiness and fear in others. Very weak experiences of both these emotions were associated with less accurate recognition of those particular emotions from the face. Fear experience was further associated with more accurate recognition of happiness and surprise. These findings support the hypothesis that own emotional experience may play a role in recognizing the emotions of other people, either through on-line simulation or through effects during development.

Go read the whole article.


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