The EQ Factor

The EQ Factor:

(Original text by Nancy Gibbs)

It turns out that a scientist can see the future by watching 4-year olds interact with a candy. The researcher invites the children, one by one, into a plain room and starts the test. You can have this candy right now, he says. But if you wait while I go have a walk, you can have two when I get back, he adds before leaving.

Some children immediately grab the candy. Some wait a few minutes. But others are determined to wait. They cover their eyes, sing songs, put their heads down, try to play games or even to fall asleep. When the researcher returns, he gives the children their hard-earned candies. And science waits for them to grow up.

By the time the children reach high school, something remarkable has happened. A survey of the children's parents and teachers found that those who as four-year-olds had waited for the second candy generally grew up better adjusted, more popular, adventurous, confident and dependable; the children who had given in easily were more likely to be lonely, easily frustrated and stubborn. And in the SAT test they usually scored 210 points lower than those who had waited for the second candy.

It seems that, in this case, the ability to delay pleasure is a master skill, a triumph of the reasoning brain over the impulsive one. It is a sign, in fact, of Emotional Intelligence. And it doesn’t show up on an IQ test.

For most of this century scientist have worshipped the brain and the mind, while the messed-up heart was left to the poets. But the theories their studies were based on don’t explain why some people just seem to have a gift for living-well, why the smartest kid in class will probably not end up as the richest one, why we like some people on sight and distrust others… What qualities determine who succeeds?

The concept of an "emotional quotient" to determine "emotional intelligence" was first used 12 years ago to describe qualities like understanding one's own feelings, empathy for the feelings of others, and regulating emotions in a way that enhances living.

EQ is not the opposite of IQ. Some people have a lot of both, some little of either. What researchers have been trying to understand is how they complement each other: how one's ability to handle stress, for example, affects the ability to concentrate and put intelligence to use. Among the ingredients of success, researchers now generally attribute 20% to IQ.

Biologists and specially evolutionists have learned enough about the brain to make judgments about where emotions come from and why we need it. Primitive, emotional responses held the key to survival (natural selection): fear drives blood into the large muscles, making it easier to run; surprises makes our eyebrows rise, allowing the eyes to widen their view and gather more information; disgust wrinkles up the face in order to block the nose from smelling a bad smell.

Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, where delight, disgust, fear and anger "come from". Millions of years ago the neocortex was added, enabling humans to plan, learn and remember. Lust comes from the limbic system; love, from the neocortex. Reptiles, for example, have no neocortex and cant experience maternal love; this is why baby snakes have to hide to avoid being eaten by their parents. The more connections there are between the limbic system and the neocortex, the more emotional responses are.

The fact is that the short circuit in the brain lets emotions drive action before the intellect gets a chance to intervene. A hiker on a mountain path, for example, sees in the corner of his eye a long, curved shape in the grass, and leaps out of the way before realizing it's just a stick that looks like a snake. Then he calms down, because his cortex gets the message a few milliseconds after his limbic system initiated the primitive response.

Without these emotional reflexes, rarely conscious but terribly powerful, we would hardly be able to function. For example, without emotions, if I'd ask you to lunch tomorrow, you'd need to think about whether you should come or not for hours. What makes us decide is our unconscious, primitive assignment of feelings to certain things.

In studies with people who had suffered from brain damage that had destroyed the relation between emotional brain and neocortex, scientists noticed that they are as smart and quick to reason as other people, but couldn’t make decisions because they didn’t know how they felt about their choices, and couldn’t react to warnings or anger in other people. If they made a mistake, they would feel no regret or shame and would tend to repeat it later.