EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF EMOTION

This article is concerned with individual differences in the ability t o connect thoughts to emotions. People who are good at connecting thou ghts to feelings may better ''hear'' the emotional implications of the ir own thoughts, as well as understand the feelings of others from wha t they say. We had 321 participants read the writings of a target grou p of people and guess what those targets had felt. Several criteria we re used to evaluate the participants' emotional recognition abilities, including agreement with the group consensus and agreement with the t arget. Participants who agreed more highly with the group consensus an d with the target also scored higher than the other participants on sc ales of empathy and self-reported SAT scores, and lower on emotional d efensiveness. Such results are interpreted to mean that some forms of emotional problem solving require emotional openness as well as genera l intelligence.