Search EQ Today   In This Issue: An interview with Dr. Martin Seligman on Positive Psychology. Beyond Suvival: Guilding Adversity with Hope -- Anabel Jensen, Ph.D. OPTIMISM, a toolbox for teaching through language -- Marsha Rideout. Growing Up Toward Life -- Doug Atkinson. EQ and Optimism, Competencies and Constructs -- Josh Freedman. Listing of great articles in the archive. Subscribe to the FREE EQ News     Visit Six Seconds' store: Useful EQ Materials

EQ and Optimism

Joshua Freedman

Optimism means believing that positive results are likely. What does it take to create those results? On a "cognitive level," Dr. Seligman has explained the thinking clearly. What about emotionally? What are the emotional shifts and processes required to create this state? And what exactly is optimism in relationship to EQ? While Daniel Goleman, Six Seconds, and many others have chosen to talk about optimism as a part of EQ, the EQ scientists say otherwise.

From a practical point of view, researchers and educators all can agree that optimism create positive results for health, relationships, and self-efficacy. Dr. Martin Seligman (Learned Optimism, The Optimistic Child) has gone a long way to convincing even the most skeptical that optimistic thinking is a set of learnable skills. There is no doubt optimism is a powerful combination of thinking and feeling that shifts us to a higher level of functioning. So how do we get there?

From a theoretical point of view, it is important to distinguish between to component parts of emotional intelligence and the outcomes and related building blocks. We do not call carpentry part of mathematical intelligence, for example, but without math carpentry is not highly successful. From a practical learning point of view, a fabulous way to develop mathematical thinking is to teach carpentry -- but for the researcher, the challenge is to break the practical into understandable pieces.

While optimism appears to be closely tied with the management of emotion, and many authors talk about it as a part of EQ, in Mayer and Salovey's more rigorous scientific definition of EQ (the definition most often cited as the first scientifically valid construct), optimism does not play a part. Dr. Peter Salovey explains the distinction:

"We would expect that many emotionally intelligent people would also be optimistic. It's just that emotional intelligence concerns the underlying abilities involved in identifying, understanding, using, and regulating emotion. Optimism is one consequence, albeit not an inevitable one, of the implementation of these skills."

The challenge Salovey offers is as significant outside the lab as inside: We see people's behaviors, but this does not necessarily tell us about the actual abilities. Every teacher has experienced a student she knows is capable of high performance, and for a variety of reasons does not perform. Yet we typically judge intelligence by behavior. The trouble comes when we over generalize. Salovey: "We must be careful to consider separately abilities and competencies versus personality dispositions and styles; they represent different kinds of psychological constructs."

Dr. Reuven Bar-On, another pioneer in the field who developed the first validated measure of an EQ construct, concurs with Salovey's perspective that optimism is related but separate: "My quick answer is that optimism is a 'facilitator' of emotional intelligence rather than an actual component of this construct. In short, optimism facilitates intelligent behavior as David Wechsler suggested 60 years ago (at the 1940 APA annual conference in a 15 minute presentation and again in a three-page article in 1943 he first spoke of these "conative" factors like optimism, drive, motivation and so forth that enhance what he called 'non-intellective' behavior)."

In other words, optimism, drive, and motivation are necessary functions that enhance EQ -- they are the carpentry. The power of this theoretical knowledge is that we see again that the vital "people smart" skills are, in fact, skills. They result from and are tied to core aspects of our brains, bodies, and styles -- and we have some measure of volition in the way we act on those core competencies. The way we use our intelligences is what is visible in the world. Now that we understand more, are we also willing to do more?