Emotional Quotient Essay

Daniel Goleman has provided the most comprehensive view to date of the skills necessary for healthy personality development. Goleman reported that the usual way of looking at intelligence as only psychological abilities contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success. 80 percent of the skills necessary for life success is determined by what he calls emotional intelligence (EQ) (Wilson, Douville-Watson, & Watson, 2002). In humans, infancy is a critical window of time. If the neurons are not properly formed and connections are improperly made, the effects can haunt a child for his lifetime. When the foundation of the brain’s architecture is properly in place, it can set the stage for future filled with potential. The foundation for emotional intelligence is formed during this period and continues for years (Schmidt, 2007). Recent evidence suggests that temperament and social environment contribute to the development of emotional labeling. Early emotional development suggests that the decoding component of emotion labeling and infants’ expressive responses to the detection of emotion signals has innate determinants and mainly a function of the emotion perception and expression systems. The emotion perception and emotion expression systems in infants are highly pre-adapted to facilitate infant-other communication. Furthermore, early studies showed that one component of EQ, children’s emotional labeling, predicted positive behavioral outcomes, after controlling for verbal and performance components of general intelligence. The ability of young infants to perceive emotion signals, discriminate among them, respond to them in meaningful ways suggest that emotional competence and adaptability has heritability and some independence of psychological development (Roberts, Matthews, & Zeidner, 2002).