Tag: Emotional Competence

What is Meant by “Fake It Till You Make It”?

Published on by Andrew Marshall2 Comments

Introduction

“Fake it till you make it” (or “Fake it until you make it”) is an aphorism that suggests that by imitating confidence, competence, and an optimistic mindset, a person can realise those qualities in their real life and achieve the results they seek.

The phrase is first attested some time before 1973. The earliest reference to a similar phrase occurs in the Simon & Garfunkel song “Fakin’ It”, released in 1968 as a single and also on their Bookends album. Simon sings, “And I know I’m fakin’ it, I’m not really makin’ it.”

Similar advice has been offered by a number of writers over time:

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. ( William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation”, On Vital Reserves, 1922).

In the law of attraction movement, “act as if you already have it”, or simply “act as if”, is a central concept:

How do you get yourself to a point of believing? Start make-believing. Be like a child, and make-believe. Act as if you have it already. As you make-believe, you will begin to believe you have received. ( Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, 2006).

In Psychology

In the 1920s, Alfred Adler developed a therapeutic technique that he called “acting as if”, asserting that “if you want a quality, act as if you already have it”. This strategy gave his clients an opportunity to practice alternatives to dysfunctional behaviours. Adler’s method is still used today and is often described as role play.

“Faking it till you make it” is a psychological tool discussed in neuroscientific research. A 1988 experiment by Fritz Strack claimed to show that mood can be improved by holding a pen between the user’s teeth to force a smile, but a posterior experiment failed to replicate it, due to which Strack was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for psychology in 2019. A later 2022 study about strategies to counter emotional distress found forced smiling not more effective than forced neutral expressions and other strategies of emotional regulation.

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What is Emotion Work?

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Introduction

Emotion work is understood as the art of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling.

Emotion work may be defined as the management of one’s own feelings, or work done in an effort to maintain a relationship; there is dispute as to whether emotion work is only work done regulating one’s own emotion, or extends to performing the emotional work for others.

Hochschild

Arlie Russell Hochschild, who introduced the term in 1979, distinguished emotion work – unpaid emotional work that a person undertakes in private life – from emotional labour: emotional work done in a paid work setting. Emotion work has use value and occurs in situations in which people choose to regulate their emotions for their own non-compensated benefit (e.g. in their interactions with family and friends). By contrast, emotional labour has exchange value because it is traded and performed for a wage.

In a later development, Hochschild distinguished between two broad types of emotion work, and among three techniques of emotion work. The two broad types involve evocation and suppression of emotion, while the three techniques of emotion work that Hochschild describes are cognitive, bodily and expressive.

However, the concept (if not the term) has been traced back as far as Aristotle: as Aristotle saw, the problem is not with emotionality, but with the appropriateness of emotion and its expression.

Examples

Examples of emotion work include showing affection, apologizing after an argument, bringing up problems that need to be addressed in an intimate relationship or any kind of interpersonal relationship, and making sure the household runs smoothly.

Emotion work also involves the orientation of self/others to accord with accepted norms of emotional expression: emotion work is often performed by family members and friends, who put pressure on individuals to conform to emotional norms. Arguably, then, an individual’s ultimate obeisance and/or resistance to aspects of emotion regimes are made visible in their emotion work.

Cultural norms often imply that emotion work is reserved for females. There is certainly evidence to the effect that the emotional management that women and men do is asymmetric; and that in general, women come into a marriage groomed for the role of emotional manager.

Criticism

The social theorist Victor Jeleniewski Seidler argues that women’s emotion work is merely another demonstration of false consciousness under patriarchy, and that emotion work, as a concept, has been adopted, adapted or criticised to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming a “catch-all-cliché”.

More broadly, the concept of emotion work has itself been criticised as a wide over-simplification of mental processes such as repression and denial which continually occur in everyday life.

Literary Analogues

Rousseau in The New Heloise suggests that the attempt to master instrumentally one’s affective life always results in a weakening and eventually the fragmentation of one’s identity, even if the emotion work is performed at the demand of ethical principles.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_work >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Emotional Competence?

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Emotional competence and emotional capital refer to the essential set of personal and social skills to recognise, interpret, and respond constructively to emotions in oneself and others. The term implies an ease around others and determines one’s ability to effectively and successfully lead and express.

Definition

Emotional competence refers to an important set of personal and social skills for identifying, interpreting, and constructively responding to emotions in oneself and others. The term implies ease in getting along with others and determines one’s ability to lead and express effectively and successfully. Psychologists define emotional competence as the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.

Description

Emotional competence is another term for emotional intelligence. It describes a person’s ability to express their emotions completely freely, and it comes from emotional intelligence, the ability to recognise emotions. Individual’s emotional competence is considered to be an important predictor of their ability to adapt to their environment, and it refers primarily to their ability to identification, understanding, expression, regulation, and use their own and other’s emotions. Emotional competence is often referred to in social contexts, and is considered a capability of recognising their own emotions, as well as those of others and expressing them in socially acceptable ways. Competence is the level of skill at which a person interacts constructively with others. This personal emotional capacity is based on a person’s perception of their emotions and how they affect others, as well as the ability to maintain control and adaptation of emotions.

Brief History

In 1999, Carolyn Saarni wrote a book named The Development of Emotional Competence. Saarni believed that emotional abilities are not innate, but are cultivated and developed through children’s interactions with others, especially family members and peers. Saarni defined emotional capacity as the functional ability of humans to achieve goals after experiencing an emotion-eliciting encounter. She defined emotion as a component of self-efficacy, and she described the use of emotions as a set of skills that lead to the development of emotional capacity.

Examples

  • Understand others: To be aware of other people’s feelings and perspectives
  • Develop others: Be aware of the development needs of others and enhance their capabilities
  • Service orientation: Anticipate, recognise and meet customer needs
  • Leverage diversity: Nurture opportunities through different types of people

Intelligence Quotient and Emotional Quotient

  • Intelligence quotient (IQ): Is a measure of person’s reasoning ability, introduced by the German psychologist Louis William Stern as a qualitative method of assessing individual differences.
  • Emotional quotient (EQ): Is a measure of self-emotional control ability, introduced in American psychologist Peter Salovey in 1991. The emotional quotient is commonly referred to in the field of psychology as emotional intelligence(also known as emotional competence or emotional skills). IQ reflects a person’s cognitive and observational abilities and how quickly they can use reasoning to solve problems. EQ, on the other hand, is an index of a person’s ability to manage their own emotions and to manage the emotions of others.

Daniel Goleman’s Model

In Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, he introduced components of EQ:

  • Self-awareness: precise awareness of self emotions
  • Self-regulation: controlled emotional expression
  • Motivation: emotional self-motivation
  • Empathy: adept at modulating the emotional responses of others and helping them to express their emotions
  • Social skills: excellent communication skills
  • Personal Competence
  • Self-Awareness – Know one’s internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions. The competencies in this category include:
    • Emotional Awareness – Recognize one’s emotions and their effects
    • Accurate Self-Assessment – Know one’s strengths and limits
    • Self-Confidence – A strong sense of one’s self-worth and abilities
    • Self-Regulation – Manage one’s internal states, impulses and resources.
  • Social Competence:
    • Empathy – Awareness of others’ feelings, needs and concerns. The competencies in this category include:
      • Understand Others – Sense others’ feelings and perspectives
      • Develop Others – Sense others’ development needs and bolstering their abilities
      • Service Orientation – Anticipate, recognise and meet customers’ needs
      • Leverage Diversity – Cultivate opportunities through different kinds of people
      • Political Awareness – Read a group’s emotional currents and power relationships
  • Emotional intelligence

Emotional Intelligence and the Four-Branch Model

Psychologists see emotional competence as a continuum, ranging from lower levels of emotional competence to perform mental functions to complex emotional competence for personal self-control and management. The higher levels of emotional competence, on the other hand, comprise four branches:

  • Perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately
  • Use emotions to facilitate thinking
  • Understand emotions, emotional language, and the signals conveyed by emotions
  • Manage emotions so as to attain specific goals

Each branch describes a set of skills that make up overall emotional intelligence, ranging from low to high complexity. For example, perceiving emotions usually begins with the ability to perceive basic emotions from faces and vocal tones, and may progress to the accurate perception of emotional blends and the capture and understanding of facial micro-expressions.

Assertiveness

Building up emotional competence is one way of learning to handle manipulative or passive-aggressive behaviour in which the manipulator exploits the feelings of another to try to get what they want.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_competence >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.