What is Emotional Competence?

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.

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What is Emotional Aperture?

Introduction

Emotional aperture has been defined as the ability to perceive features of group emotions.

This skill involves the perceptual ability to adjust one’s focus from a single individual’s emotional cues to the broader patterns of shared emotional cues that comprise the emotional composition of the collective.

Background

Some examples of features of group emotions include:

  • The level of variability of emotions among members (i.e. affective diversity);
  • The proportion of positive or negative emotions; and
  • The modal (i.e. most common) emotion present in a group.

The term “emotional aperture” was first defined by the social psychologist, Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, and organisational theorist, Quy Huy. It has since been referenced in related work such as in psychologist, journalist, and author of the popular book Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman’s most recent book “Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence.” Academic references to emotional aperture and related work can be found on the references site for the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organisations.

Emotional Aperture abilities have been measured using the emotional aperture measure (EAM). The EAM consists of a series of short movie clip showing groups that have various brief reactions to an unspecified event. Following each movie clip, individuals are asked to report the proportion of individuals that had a positive or negative reaction.

Origin

The construct, emotional aperture, was developed to address the need to expand existing models of individual emotion perception (e.g. emotional intelligence) to take into account the veracity of group-based emotions and their action tendencies.

Book: Fully Human – 3 Steps to Grow Your Emotional Fitness in Work, Leadership, and Life

Book Title:

Fully Human – 3 Steps to Grow Your Emotional Fitness in Work, Leadership, and Life.

Author(s): Susan Packard.

Year: 2020.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: Tarcherperigee.

Type(s): Hardcover, Paperback, Audiobook, and Kindle.

Synopsis:

HGTV cofounder Susan Packard launches the next chapter in emotional intelligence (EQ), and shows you how to increase your personal satisfaction and productivity – in work and life – via her three-step path toward EQ Fitness.

Emotions can sink us, or they can power us like fuel to succeed. Many of us show up for work, and life, feeling lonely even in a room full of people, or bringing unproductive emotions into work, like anger or fear. You do not have to feel this way. Susan Packard offers an accessible new guidebook to grow your emotional fitness, and it has arrived just in time, as technology is quickly becoming our main interface for communication. No matter where you are in your career, success is an inside job. Packard lays out how to develop interdependent work relationships, and for leaders, how to build healthy company cultures.

Packard introduces us to successful people, and companies, that are rich with ‘connector’ emotions like hope, empathy and trust-building. She tackles unconventional topics, like how workaholism keeps us emotionally adolescent, and how forgiveness belongs in the workplace too. Packard shares her EQ Fit-catalysed success at HGTV and the stories of the executives she coaches in mindfulness and other emerging techniques, and she teaches an ‘inside out’ practice of self-discovery, which helps you uncover unproductive emotions, and dispel them.

The best leaders balance power and grace, and everyone can effectively use resilience – an ability to endure tough situations and make tough decisions, and vulnerability, a willingness to open up, change, and admit when we need help. She offers new tools to bring our strongest emotional selves to work each day.