In 1985 Wayne Leon Payne, then a graduate student at an alternative liberal arts college in the USA, wrote a doctoral dissertation which included the term "emotional intelligence" in the title. This seems to be the first academic use of the term "emotional intelligence." In next five years, no one else seems to have used the term "emotional intelligence" in any academic papers.

Then in 1990 the work of two American university professors, John Mayer and Peter Salovey, was published in two academic journal articles. Mayer, (U. of New Hampshire), and Salovey (Yale), were trying to develop a way of scientifically measuring the difference between people's ability in the area of emotions. They found that some people were better than others at things like identifying their own feelings, identifying the feelings of others, and solving problems involving emotional issues. The title of one of these papers was titled "Emotional Intelligence".

Since 1990 these professors have developed two tests to attempt to measure what they are calling our "emotional intelligence." Because nearly all of their writing has been done in the academic community, their names and their actual research findings are not widely known.

Instead, the person most commonly associated with the term emotional intelligence is actually a New York writer and consultant named Daniel Goleman. In the early 1990's Goleman had been writing articles for the magazine Popular Psychology and then later for the New York Times newspaper. In 1992 he was doing research for a book about emotions and emotional literacy when he discovered the 1990 article by Salovey and Mayer. According to the article by Annie Paul, Goleman asked them permission to use the term "emotional intelligence" in his book and that permission was granted providing he told people where he heard the term. Before then it seems his book was planning to focus on "emotional literacy". See this discussion for more about this.

In 1995 Goleman's book came out under the title "Emotional Intelligence." The book made it to the cover of Time Magazine in the USA and Goleman began appearing on American television shows such as Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue. He also began a speaking tour to promote the book and the book became an international best seller. It remained on the New York Times best-seller list for approximately one year.

In the book he collected, and often dramatized, a lot of information on the brain, emotions, and behavior. On the Daniel Goleman page you can see notes and criticisms of the book. One thing Goleman has been criticized for is misrepresenting what Salovey and Mayer meant by the term "emotional intelligence". Annie Paul says Goleman "distorted their model in disturbing ways." John Mayer has been quoted as saying "Goleman has broadened the definition of emotional intelligence to such an extent that it no longer has any scientific meaning or utility and is no longer a clear predictor of outcome.

As written in my Short Defintion Section, I believe each child enters the world with a unique potential for these components of emotional intelligence:

1. Emotional sensitivity

2. Emotional memory

3. Emotional processing and problem solving ability

4. Emotional learning ability.

 

The way we are raised dramatically affects what happens to our potential in each of these areas. For example a baby might be born with a very high potential for music, he or she might be a potential Mozart, but if that child is never given the chance to develop their musical potential, they will never become a talented musician later in life, and the world will miss out on this person's special gift to humanity.