History of Emotional Intelligence

Emotion originates from the Latin verb “emovare” which implies continually changing and moving (Callahan & McCollum, 2002)

• Thorndike (1920) did the early work on emotional intelligence by viewing intelligence from a different dimension known as “social intelligence”. Thorndike defined social intelligence as “the ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls to act wisely in human relations” (p. 228). In other words, social intelligence is about understanding and managing others.

• Then, Gardner (1983) proposed “Theory of multiple intelligence” by defining intelligence as “the ability to solve a problem” (p. 25). In his multiple intelligence theory, intelligence was divided into eight aspects including intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence. Intrapersonal intelligence is about introspecting, while interpersonal intelligence is about understanding others.

• Both intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence serves as a foundation for the development of emotional intelligence concept by Salovey and Mayer (Salovey & Mayer, 1990).

• In 1990, Salovey and Mayer expounded the term “emotional intelligence”. The psychologists divided mind into three major components namely cognitive, affective and motivation components. The term “emotion” indicates affective component while “intelligence” indicates cognitive component.

•  According to Mayer and Salovey (1997),

“Emotional intelligence is a persons’ capability to perceive, express, understand, use, and manage emotions in oneself (personal intelligence) and in others’ (social intelligence) which lead to adaptive behaviour”. In other words, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and regulate emotions.

• In 1987, Keith Beasley used the term Emotional Quotient (EQ) first time in an article, named after the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) in the British Mensa magazine.