Emotional Intelligence Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Emotional Intelligence - Essay Example coined the phrase â€Å"emotional intelligence† which they defined as being a type of social intelligence that included the ability to monitor their own feelings and those of people around them. This awareness would allow the individual to use that information to modify their own behavior and speech patterns to greatly increase their chances of successful communication. However the concept of emotional intelligence has been traced back to Edward Thorndike and his work Law of effect research (1911). The key element of Thorndike’s (1911) theory was the idea that in cases where responses are made to a situation, if the consequence of those responses was a positive experience (bringing pleasure) then it was more likely for those responses to be evident again in future similar situations. Conversely those situations that bring about a negative consequence (pain) were not likely to result in recurring responses for future events. Thereby Thorndike offered a positive and negative law of effect. This was the first time that such a theory had been proposed and supported by experimental evidence. His later work on animal intelligence made constant reference to this same theory. For example he noted that in his experiment of a cat in a box that â€Å"gradually all the other non-successful impulses will be stamped out and the particular impulse leading to the successful act will be stamped in by the resulting pleasure†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (1898, p.13). He made similar observations about confined chickens. What he was looking for, or appeared to have identified was a connectionist theory that could explain the mechanism behind reinforcer action. This was an idea that was explored by later researchers such as Hull (1943) and more notably Skinner’s work on reinforcement. Skinner’s (1938) work on reinforcement did address a noted criticism of Thorndike’s work: namely circularity and affect. Thorndike’s aim was to find the underlying mechanism for certain actions – namely