Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite

Emotional Intelligence(EQ), or the ability to be able to identify and respond to the other person’s feelings is a soft-skill based on two flawed assumptions:

1. It is possible to detect or gauge the emotions of the other person accurately.
2. Emotions are triggered by outside events and can be controlled by rationality.

New studies find that faces and bodies are not the perfect communicators of a person’s emotional state, and one cannot control someone’s emotion using logic, making the traditional understanding of Emotional Intelligence outdated.

A scientific way to define and understand emotional intelligence is to view your brain as a construction, an on-the-fly builder of thoughts, emotions, and perceptions.

The reflex-like emotional reactions are just the tip of the iceberg, and the brain is constantly shape-shifting itself and processing the sensory inputs that are received into useful predictions and actions.