Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a psychological concept defined as the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions in oneself and others. It is also known as Emotional Quotient (EQ). The concept's foundation was laid by psychologist Edward Thorndike, who introduced social intelligence in 1920, defining it as the ability to understand and manage people. The idea was further developed in 1983 when Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences proposed that traditional IQ failed to explain cognitive ability fully, including interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence.
The term Emotional Intelligence was formally introduced in 1990 by psychologists Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, who defined it as "the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions". The concept gained widespread popularity with the publication of Daniel Goleman's bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more than IQ, in 1995.
The mechanism of EI is often explained through key components, with Goleman's widely-cited model outlining five: self-awareness, self-regulation (or self-control), motivation, empathy, and social skills. Salovey and Mayer's ability model, which treats EI as a set of cognitive skills, focuses on four branches: perceiving emotions, using emotions to facilitate thought, understanding emotions, and managing emotions. EI connects to broader concepts like social intelligence and multiple intelligences.
The core understanding of EI—the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions—has stayed the same, but the theoretical models have been refined. Recent research has seen the emergence of new concepts like Meta-emotional intelligence (MEI) in 2013, which adds cognitive aspects and meta-emotional dimensions like beliefs about emotions to the framework. The ability model itself was revised by Mayer, Caruso, and Salovey in 2016, acknowledging that the structure of its four components may still need further revision.