What Is Emotional Intelligence (EQ)? Four Skills and How They Grow

The scientific idea of emotional intelligence was set out by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990. They described it as the ability to perceive emotions accurately, use them to support thinking, understand how they work and manage them in yourself and others. Daniel Goleman's 1995 bestseller then brought the term to a wide audience, along with the nickname EQ.

The core claim is simple: emotions carry information. A flash of irritation may signal that something matters to you, and a friend's quiet tone may signal that they need support. People who read and use that information well tend to handle social situations and stress more smoothly. Emotional intelligence is not the same as being nice or always calm. It is about accuracy and good judgment with feelings.

Perceiving emotions is the starting point: recognizing feelings in faces, voices, posture and behaviour, as well as noticing your own emotional state before it takes over. Someone strong here might notice a colleague's frustration before it is put into words.

Understanding emotions means knowing why feelings arise, how they blend and how they tend to change. Disappointment can turn into resentment if it is ignored, and anxiety and excitement can feel surprisingly similar in the body. This knowledge helps you predict how a situation is likely to unfold.

Managing your own emotions is the ability to stay open to feelings and steer them in useful directions, for example by calming yourself before a hard conversation rather than suppressing everything. Managing relationships applies the same skill to other people: responding to their feelings in ways that build trust, defuse tension and help everyone move forward.

There are two broad ways to measure emotional intelligence. Ability tests present problems, such as reading an emotion from a scenario or choosing the most effective response to a situation, and score them against better and worse answers. Self-report questionnaires ask you to rate statements about yourself, such as how well you think you handle stress.

The two approaches capture different things. Self-reports reflect how you see yourself, which can be influenced by confidence and mood, and they overlap considerably with personality traits. Ability tests are closer to measuring what you can actually do, but they depend on how the 'best' answers were decided. Research has generally found only a modest link between the two kinds of scores, so it is worth knowing which kind of test you are taking.

Emotional skills show up everywhere: in how you give feedback, how you recover after a setback, how you comfort a friend and how you handle a disagreement with a partner. Studies have linked emotional intelligence with aspects of relationship quality and coping, though the size of these links varies and EQ is one factor among many.

It is wise to be sceptical of bold claims that EQ matters more than anything else for success. A more grounded view is that emotional skills make other abilities easier to use. A strong plan helps more when you can also persuade people, and good ideas travel further when you can listen and stay steady under pressure.

Start by naming feelings more precisely. Instead of 'bad', try 'disappointed', 'embarrassed' or 'overloaded'. Research on affect labeling suggests that putting feelings into words can soften their intensity, and finer labels give you clearer clues about what you need.

Build a short pause between feeling and action. A few slow breaths, a walk or a moment of asking 'what else could be going on here?' gives you room to choose a response. Reframing a situation, a strategy psychologists call cognitive reappraisal, is one of the best studied ways of managing emotions.

With other people, ask before you assume. Reflecting back what you heard ('it sounds like you felt left out') shows that you are listening and lets the other person correct you. Over time, asking trusted people for honest feedback on how you come across is one of the most direct ways to grow. Some structured training programs have reported modest improvements, which supports the idea that these skills are learnable.

The Witprism EQ test uses 28 everyday situations. For each one, you read the feelings involved and choose how best to respond, which makes it closer to an ability test than a self-description. It takes about eight minutes and gives an EQ score on the 100 and 15 scale, plus your relative strengths across perceiving, understanding, managing your emotions and managing relationships.

Like any online test, it gives an estimate for self-reflection, not a clinical measure. The most useful part is often the profile: knowing whether your strength lies in reading people or in steadying yourself can point you to the one habit worth practising next.