Emotional intelligence: what the science actually says

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise emotions — your own and other people's — to understand what they mean and where they are heading, and to use and manage them in ways that help rather than harm. Someone with good emotional skills notices that they are becoming irritable before they snap, can tell that a colleague's silence means hurt rather than agreement, and can calm a tense family discussion instead of inflaming it.

The idea is real and useful. It has also been heavily marketed. This article separates the research version from the popular one, and sets out which claims hold up.

Two versions of the same idea

Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer published the first scientific papers on emotional intelligence in 1990. Five years later, journalist and psychologist Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ became a worldwide bestseller and took the term into schools, offices and management courses — often with a much broader meaning.

The four abilities

In the ability model, emotional intelligence has four branches, each building on the one before:

1. Perceiving emotions — reading faces, voices and body language, and noticing your own feelings.
2. Using emotions to help thinking — for example, knowing that a slightly anxious mood can sharpen attention to detail.
3. Understanding emotions — knowing how feelings combine and change: that disappointment can turn into anger, or that embarrassment often hides behind rudeness.
4. Managing emotions — calming or lifting your own mood, and helping others with theirs, in ways that fit your goals.

What the research supports — and what is hype

A 2008 review in the Annual Review of Psychology by Mayer, Richard Roberts and Sigal Barsade concluded that emotional intelligence, measured as an ability, predicts meaningful outcomes: the quality of social relationships, aspects of workplace performance, and mental and physical wellbeing — often beyond what IQ and personality already explain.

The same review was blunt about popular questionnaires. Many self-report EI scales correlate at around 0.6 to 0.7 with low neuroticism, one of the Big FiveBig Five personality traitsThe most widely used scientific model of personality. It describes people on five broad scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.Read the full definition personality traits, and the Big Five together predict most of their scores. People's own estimates of their emotional ability matched their tested ability only weakly, and in one study people raised their scores substantially simply by being asked to look good. The authors questioned whether these scales measure emotional intelligence at all. A 2010 meta-analysis by Dana Joseph and Daniel Newman similarly flagged the overlap between EI measures, personality and general intelligence as a central problem for the field.

Can emotional intelligence be learned?

Yes, to a moderate degree. A 2019 meta-analysis by Victoria Mattingly and Kurt Kraiger pooled 58 studies of emotional intelligence training and found a moderate positive effect that held for men and women and for both ability and questionnaire measures. Training worked better when it involved practice and feedback rather than lectures. Many of the studies were small, and long-term follow-up is limited, but the direction is encouraging: these are skills, and skills improve with deliberate practice.

Practical skills you can practise

• Name the feeling precisely. ‘Upset’ covers many states — hurt, embarrassed, disappointed, jealous, anxious, humiliated. In a 2007 brain-imaging study, simply putting a feeling into words reduced activity in the amygdalaAmygdalaA small, almond-shaped structure deep inside each side of the brain that processes emotions, especially fear, and helps trigger the body's alarm response to threats.Read the full definition, the brain's alarm centre, and increased activity in part of the prefrontal cortexPrefrontal cortexThe front part of the brain, behind the forehead, responsible for planning, decision-making, self-control and weighing consequences. It is one of the last areas to mature, in the mid-to-late 20s.Read the full definition. Building a wider vocabulary, in Urdu, Punjabi or English, gives you more control.
• Notice the body first. A clenched jaw, hot face, tight chest or restless leg often announces a feeling before you have words for it.
• Pause before responding. Even a few slow breaths between the trigger and your reply gives the thinking brain time to catch up. For stronger feelings, step away and return.
• Ask what the feeling is telling you. Anger often signals unfairness; anxiety, uncertainty; sadness, loss. The feeling is information, not an instruction.
• Listen to understand, not to reply. Reflect back what you heard — ‘It sounds like you felt ignored when…’ — before offering solutions.
• Validate before you advise. Saying ‘that sounds really hard’ is not agreeing; it is recognising. People accept advice more easily once they feel understood.

Emotions, culture and family rules

What counts as emotionally skilled depends partly on culture. Every family has unwritten rules about which feelings may be shown, by whom and to whom. In many Pakistani homes, boys learn early that mard ko dard nahi hota — men do not show pain — and daughters-in-law learn to keep frustration hidden in front of elders. Elders themselves often express worry indirectly, as criticism or as a question about whether you have eaten.

None of this means people in such families lack emotional intelligence. Reading indirect signals and knowing when silence is kinder than words are real skills. The difficulty comes when feelings are never allowed out at all. Unspoken sadness can surface as physical symptomsPsychosomatic symptomsReal physical symptoms — pain, dizziness, stomach upset, weakness — that are driven or worsened by stress and emotion rather than by damage to an organ. They are not imagined.Read the full definition such as headaches and stomach trouble, or as irritability, and unspoken anger can build until it explodes. A useful goal is not to copy Western openness, but to have at least one relationship where you can name what you feel honestly — and to let your children do the same.

In marriage and family life

A 2014 meta-analysis by John Malouff and colleagues found that people with higher (self-reported) emotional intelligence tended to be more satisfied in their romantic relationships — and so did their partners. In a joint family, the same skills matter between in-laws, parents and adult children: recognising when a remark is driven by worry rather than criticism, and raising a grievance calmly with ‘I felt… when…’ rather than ‘you always…’.

At work

Emotional skills help most in jobs full of other people's feelings — medicine and nursing, teaching, sales, customer service and management. A doctor who can read a frightened patient, or a manager who notices a team member is struggling, does the job better. But emotional intelligence cannot substitute for fair pay, reasonable workloads and decent leadership, and asking staff to ‘be more emotionally intelligent’ about an unfair system misses the point.

When emotional difficulties need more than skills

Some people struggle with emotions not because they lack information but because the feelings are overwhelming — intense rage, mood swings, self-harm to cope, or feeling numb and cut off. Skills tips will not be enough on their own. Therapies such as DBTDialectical behaviour therapyA therapy for people whose emotions are very intense and hard to manage. It teaches practical skills for handling distress and relationships, and is best known for borderline personality disorder and self-harm.Read the full definition teach emotional regulationEmotional regulationThe ability to notice, understand and manage emotions — how strongly they are felt, how long they last and how they are expressed — so they do not take over. It is a skill that can be learned.Read the full definition in a structured way. See a doctor or psychologist if emotional outbursts are damaging relationships or work, if you are harming yourself, or if low mood or anxietyAnxiety disorderWorry or fear that is stronger than the situation calls for, lasts for weeks or months, and gets in the way of daily life. Anxiety disorders are common and treatable.Read the full definition has lasted two weeks or more.