Hidden Brain - How Feelings Make Us Smarter

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Some people are remarkably good at reading the emotional temperature of a situation. They can pick up on what others are feeling, manage their own emotions, and respond skillfully. What's their secret? This week, we explore the science of emotional intelligence with psychologist Peter Salovey.  Emotional intelligence is one of the most popular ideas in psychology. It's also a term that's widely misused and misunderstood. We explore these misconceptions in a bonus conversation with Peter Salovey for Hidden Brain+ subscribers. If you're not yet a subscriber, you can hear it with a free seven-day trial to Hidden Brain+. Please visit support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co/hiddenbrain to listen to that episode. Your subscription helps support the research, writing, and audio production that go into every episode of Hidden Brain. We appreciate your support!    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In October 1967, the world's greatest chess minds gathered in Seuss, Tunisia, to face off at the interzonal tournament, the high-stakes gateway to the World Chess Championship. The early games were dominated by the American prodigy, Bobby Fisher. He was a 24-year-old grandmaster with an IQ rumor to be at the genius level of 180. He was the favorite to win it all. But despite his overwhelming lead, the tournament quickly spiraled into a masterclass in self-sabotage. Bobby Fisher issued a series of escalating demands regarding his playing schedule.

When organizers refused to rearrange the event to suit him, he walked out, withdrawing from the tournament while in first place, and throwing away years of work in a single fit of frustration. The walkout was a window into a profound emotional ineptness that lived right alongside Bobby Fisher's brilliance. Throughout his career, he operated in a state of constant relational friction, alienating the very coaches and friends who try to support him. At his chess matches, he frequently violated the social norms of the game, arriving late and refusing to make eye contact with the player sitting across from him.

Bobby Fisher possessed a mind that could see a dozen moves ahead on a chess board, but he struggled with the basic moves of social and emotional life. This week on Hidden Brain and in a companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, the logic of emotion and how feelings make us smarter. Think back to the last time you made a decision you regret it. Perhaps you felt blinded by rage or paralyzed by fear. In those moments, it feels like our emotions are obstacles to our success, a vestige of our primitive brains getting in a moment.

in the way of our rational minds. But research in recent decades into the world of emotions suggests that this idea is profoundly wrong. Emotions are central to our ability to understand, attend, and to prioritize. They aren't obstacles that block our path. They are food and fuel for the journey. Peter Salovey is a psychologist at Yale University.

He studies how our emotions shape our decisions and our behavior. Peter Salove, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much, Shankar. It's a real honor to be with you. I listen to your show regularly and I've enjoyed seeing you live as well. And so it's a privilege to be a guest. Peter, in addition to being a psychology professor at Yale,

you've held several administrative posts at the university, including Provost and Dean. While you were dean, a prominent individual visited the campus. Can you paint me a picture of the moment you got to shake hands with the president? Yes, we had invited President Clinton to visit campus. And if memory serves, he was going to give a talk on campus at the time. And they lined all of us up, all the deans in the boardroom, actually, of the university. when you were around the perimeter

and President Clinton walked in. And he worked his way around the perimeter of the room, shaking hands with everyone. And when he got to me, I was quite nervous, actually. And he stuck out his hands and he said, I'm Bill Clinton. And I said, I'm Peter Salve.

I'm the dean of Yale College. And he said, you know, it's a pleasure to meet you, Peter. we actually already know each other. So when he said that you had met earlier, had you actually met him earlier, Peter? No, I had never met him, at least, you know, not to my memory, but no, no, I had never met him. I had never met him.

And so I was surprised when he said that. And, of course, I was a little nervous. Like, am I forget that I had met Bill Clinton? How could that possibly be? So I'm a little self-conscious in my interaction. at that point. So something happened earlier that day that is pertinent to what Bill Clinton told you. Tell me what happened earlier that morning, Peter.

Yeah, so as I was coming on campus, really, to park near where this meet and greet was going to take place, I saw a spot, I pulled in quickly, and I didn't realize it, but I had pulled right in front of Bill Clinton's limo. and, in fact, kind of cut it off. And a Secret Service agent or some kind of security that was with him jumped out of the car and said, hey, wait, wait, wait, wait. And President Clinton rolled the window down and said, no, no, no, no, it's okay. That guy's the dean. And I realized he had been reviewing the people he was going to meet

in his car, most likely, as a public figure might. And so when I was in the meet-and-greet line to meet him, he said to me, we already know each other. And I was so charmed by this. And more importantly, he could tell I was nervous. You could tell I was anxious meeting the president. And he told that story to sort of say, there's no need to be nervous, Mr. Dean. We're old friends. We had an interaction earlier today. It put me at ease. It was a wonderful example of President Clinton managing my emotions. He can see I'm nervous. No need to be nervous.

We're old friends, he says. And in fact, the old friends is based on an embarrassing interaction, but that doesn't matter. I've seen photographs of the moment. He's looking me in the eye and giving me a firm handshake. And it's that when he's looking at me, he is seeing that I have a look of nervousness or fear, anxiety in my face. And it cues him to do something, which is tell this story about the interaction with him and his limo and the Secret Service because he knows it might put me at ease. So it makes us feel familiar and like old.

old friends. What Peter realized after the fact was that Bill Clinton had demonstrated an essential idea in Peter's own research. Some people are incredibly skilled at reading a room. In interactions with others, this gives them an edge.

They can see around the corners of a conversation, soothe frictions, put people at ease. Some years after this incident, Peter became a president himself. He became president of Yale. He inherited a challenge that required the same skills of him that Bill Clinton had shown in that interaction.

We had a residential college named for John C. Calhoun. It's called Calhoun College. John C. Calhoun was a senator, was the vice president of the United States, all before the Civil War, served as, I think, Secretary of State and Secretary of War as well. But what he was most well known for is he was. his ardent defense of slavery. Slavery not just as a, quote, way of life in the South, but to use his words as a positive good. He believed, and he rooted it in white supremacy,

he viewed it as the proper order of society. And I imagine he must have gone to Yale himself if a building was named after him. Yeah, he'd been vice president of the United States. He was a Yale graduate. And when the building was built in about 1930, there was a debate about who to name it for. And there were two colleges being named that year. And they named one of the colleges after a minister.

And so the other was to be named after the most prominent statesman who at the time would have been Johnson Calhoun. So with that as history, over the years, many decades, there had been more and less protest about this name. Why do we name a college after the most ardent defender of slavery? And so I, in some ways, tired of receiving petitions about this or watching protest, I said, let's have a conversation. And I gave my welcoming speech that fall. And I said, let's have the kind of conversations you should have on campus about whether we should continue to have a college named for John C. C. C. C. C. C. C.ohun? And I made the argument that good people, moral people, thoughtful people would likely find themselves on both sides of this issue. some wanting change, some saying we don't need to honor John C. C. C. C. Cohen. And others saying, we may not agree with John C. Cohen. But he's a public figure, a historic figure. And universities should not be in the business of effacing history.

So early on, as this controversy was brewing, you decided that the name should not be changed. Talk about it. about the moment you actually announced this to the campus and what the reaction was, Peter? Sure. While our students generally wanted the name to be changed, our alumni did not, and our faculty at that point were largely not interested in this particular issue. And I talked to many experts, the head of the NACP, prominent African-Americans. American intellectuals who had lived in Calhoun College when they were Yale undergraduates and many, many others. And all of them were profoundly ambivalent about the idea of effacing history. We should leave his name on there.

Many of them said, but confront him in other ways. And so in light of that, I had announced that we would maintain the name, but we would contextualize it. We would put up educational materials, plaques and the like, explaining who he was and what he believed and why we left his name on the college. Well, I think the next day after announcing that decision, there was a very loud protest on campus, led by students. We had a town hall meeting at which I spoke, and now the faculty were quite energized by the issue. I think seeing how upset the students were, they were then called. for a different outcome. I understand that during the town hall,

there was a moment when students were showering you with fake cash to make the assertion that you cared more about, you know, donors and the alumni than the well-being of students. And that must have come as something of a shock to you. That, of course, was a shock to me. You know, I was a very student-oriented president. I taught students,

introductory psychology for many, many, many years. And so I was not happy about that kind of protest. Several months later, in the summer, a worker in Calhoun College, I believe he was a dining hall worker, noticed that the iconography, the symbolism, the windows, stained glass windows in Calhoun College reflected themes relevant to the name. They reflected the Old South, African Americans picking cotton. John C. Calhoun is kind of a statesman looking regal. And he, in a kind of emotional moment, he broke one of these stained glass windows, I believe it was the one of the African Americans picking cotton. And he said that as a black man,

I couldn't stand looking at that every day. And I needed to do something. I'm wondering, Peter, as you heard about all this protest and you saw how intense the feelings were, did you have a moment when you felt that you had in some ways misjudged the intensity, the depth of feelings that existed on campus about this issue? Yes, and I think part of that was

that times were changing. This was all happening in a dynamic environment. It was happening in real time. And I think when we began this conversation, sure, students wanted change. But many other people, quite reasonably, made the argument that a facing history was not appropriate. I think views shifted over the course of that year.

And in the course of grappling with my own feelings about that, I met with an African-American student who grew up in South Carolina. In fact, she grew up, I believe, in a home just off of Calhoun Street in Charleston. This student said to me something very interesting. She said, I've known the name of Calhoun all my life. I know who he is. I can handle being in a space named for John C. Calvin, such as Calhoun College. But I don't want to live in a shrine to slavery. And I said, that's a powerful metaphor.

What do you mean by that? She goes, look at the stained glass windows. Look at the reliefs carved into the stone walls. Look at the artifact. from plantations in the south that are in the collection of this college. Look at the name that is on our t-shirts when we go out and play intramural sports. This has become a shrine to slavery. And I swallowed hard.

And I had a moment of emotional understanding and deep empathy that the debate really wasn't entirely about do you honor figures from the past, even if we completely disavow their viewpoints now, or whether you efface history, or whether times change and who we honor should change. I suddenly got focused on how people feel. thinking about that student living in a shrine to slavery, thinking about our worker so moved to an act of vandalism, that he risked his job, he risked criminal prosecution. It was a shift in my thinking. And it was really a processing of those emotions.

triggered by my interaction with the student primarily, that created a moment of clarity for me and suggested that we needed to consider an alternative path. What did you end up doing? We ended up changing the name. The name of that college is Grace Hopper College, named after early computer scientist, I think before the field had even been invented.

and a Navy Admiral. But we honored her service and being one of the early founders of the field. She had gotten her PhD in mathematics at Yale. But it was really this moment of insight created by the arousal of empathy following an emotional conversation with a student that set me anyway on a different course in my thinking. One of the most consequential challenges we face in daily life is to read what is happening in the emotional lives of other people. When we come back, how the ability to read the emotional undercurrents in a room can transform our lives.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Schools and universities often test students on their knowledge of complex material. In the workplace, employees are promoted because of their expertise and problem-solving skills. We've all heard of geniuses who produce great works of literature or magnificent musical compositions. But dig a layer deeper, and you find that some of the smartest people are not very smart when it comes to gauging the emotional temperature of a situation. When they meet someone new, they find it hard to tell friend from foe,

They are unaware of the emotional undercurrent swirling around them, and they often behave like bulls in China shops. Peter Salivay is a psychologist at Yale University. He studies how our emotions shape our decisions and our behavior. Peter, your research tackles a longstanding belief of Western culture that thinking and feeling are opposing forces in the mind. Talk a moment about the long history of that idea. Yes. Whether you're looking at, you know, stoic philosophers or many religious traditions and the like,

the idea is that we shouldn't be ruled by our passions. You know, rule your feelings or your feelings will rule you. It's kind of the idea that on the one hand, we have thought and reason, and on the other, we have emotions, passions. The belief was somehow that our emotions were vestigial, meaning, yes, they're part of our animal heritage, just like our wisdom teeth, just like our appendices. But we don't really need them anymore. We are a thinking species. Peter and a colleague, Jack Mayer,

noticed there were all kinds of situations where people are asked to read the emotional temperature of a situation. Some people are better at doing this than others. wasn't this a kind of intelligence too, they wondered? Together, they came up with a formulation for the skill they were talking about. They called it emotional intelligence. The idea came to them in the oddest of places, not a lab, but as the two were painting Peter's living room.

Yeah, that is what happened, and we're painting the living room, we're talking about emotions, we're talking about intelligence. We both had done research on the impact of mood and emotion on memory, on judgment, on decision-making, and we were just chatting as we painted. Jack was very nice to help me paint my living, and we'd only been friends a year or two at that point, and talked about this idea of emotional intelligence. My original idea was let's develop a framework

for organizing all of these abilities having to do with the emotions and their effect on thinking and behavior. Jack came out of a more traditional, intelligence laboratory, but had now turned his attention to mood and emotion. And he was wondering whether you could measure any of this. And so we came together in that way. Yes, and it was while painting my house. Peter and his colleagues have found ways to measure emotional intelligence. Instead of asking people about their emotional skills, people turn out to be poor judges of their own emotional intelligence, the researchers came up with a series of tests.

How good were people at reading the expressions of others? How well did they understand what was happening in their own emotional lives? How skillful were they at regulating their emotions? They came up with a measure, very much like an IQ test. It came to be called the Mayor Salovee-Carruso scale, or Mesquite, for short. We did a study in which you came to the lab as a participant in research and had to interact with a stranger and then the stranger would rate how well did you listen to him

how connected were you trying to be with him how empathic did you seem and for our participants who scored well on the mesquite, the stranger rated them more highly. But also, we could show videos of that interaction to others, who had no idea, of course, what the experiment really was about, and they rated the person as more sociable,

better able to make friends and the like, if they had higher scores. We could also do just correlational studies. How many friends do you have? It's predicted by the mesquite, by our emotional intelligence measure. Do you engage in pro-social behaviors with friends? Are you more likely to help, to share, or are you more likely to get into arguments and fights? All of it predicted by emotional intelligence.

So I'm sure everyone listening knows of someone who everyone wants to be their friend because they listen well, they empathize, they reflect feelings. They seem to be able to pick up on something about you that many others don't. And they seem to be able to kind of walk a mile in your shoes. And not surprisingly, they are the kinds of individuals who you would love to have as a friend. You've also looked at how emotional intelligence makes a difference in other realms of life. young people who are more emotionally intelligent tend to be less likely to engage in risky behaviors.

Why do you think this might be the case, Peter? Yeah, that's right. We've shown correlations between mesquite scores and the likelihood of using drugs or alcohol, particularly in adolescence. Higher scores on the mesquite predict less likelihood of drug or alcohol use, less likelihood of delinquent behavior.

I think some of it is, you know, if you're more in touch with your own emotions, you don't need, what would I say, illicit substances to help you regulate them? You're less likely to need to self-medicate. Similarly, if you're better able to empathize, better able to understand the emotions of another person,

you're less likely to have conflict with them, less likely to think the way to settle differences is through fighting. Maybe most importantly, you're more likely as a kid to stay in school because you like school and you like learning better. So I think it's all of a piece, right? You're happier in the school environment, more likely to make friends, less likely to become frustrated, drop out, more likely to not self-medicate with drugs or alcohol when you get older.

It's all of a piece. And this is not just when you are looking at the behavior of students and young people. You find emotional intelligence plays a role in our work lives. For sure. One small study we did was at an insurance company where we measured traditional intelligence. We measured personality. And we also gave them a skee, or measure of emotional intelligence. And what we predicted a time later,

were the performance reviews you received from your boss and whether you were likely to get a promotion and how big a raise that you received at work. But the emotional intelligence test that we used, the mesquite was a good predictor of those kinds of workplace outcomes. People who are better able to regulate their own emotions were at a huge advantage in the workplace. You've written and talked quite a bit about what

an emotionally intelligent manager looks like, Peter. What are the qualities of individuals in the workplace? And what are they able to do in their interactions with others? So the emotionally intelligent manager, they recognize what might be going on in a situation beyond what people are simply saying. They recognize that somebody might be saying one thing but feeling another and that that needs to be explored

in depth. But I could tell you a story. In early days, David Caruso and I were doing some training at a large investment bank. And this was before the Great Recession. And this was a bank that was quite affected by the Great Recession. And these were essentially vice presidents and senior vice presidents, engaged in banking, engaged in trading, engaged in providing investment advice, and the like. And only 10% of them or so were going to be promoted to their ultimate goal, which was to become a managing director, which is where much more serious compensation is received. And so we would ask at the beginning of our conversation, at the beginning of our sessions,

how many of you feel that you are above average in IQ? And every hand would go out. Then we'd say, how many of you feel that you have strong analytic or mathematical or economics skills for your jobs? And every hand would go on? We'd look at them and say, I don't understand. You all are above average in IQ. You all feel you have the analytic and economic,

and mathematical skills to do your job. And yet, 90% of you are not going to get to be managing directors. What is that all about? And they would say, well, I guess some people are better able at inspiring others. Some people are better able to manage their own emotions. Some people are better able to manage a group's emotion. Some people are more charismatic. and they'd start to generate what it meant to be an emotionally intelligent person in that context.

And recognizing that that was the differentiator, not the analytic skills. Everybody was smart. I understand, Peter, that some research has also employed brain scanning to study the brain activity of people as they solve emotion-related problems. In the study that you're referring to, we ask people to solve problems that were social in nature, problems about conflict with others and the like. And maybe the most important aspect of that work

is it has seriously challenged the idea that cognition and emotion are separate. You can see in fMRI scans that the parts of the brain thought to be involved in emotion and the parts of the brain thought to be involved in thinking, in decision-making, in problem-solving, in creativity, are closely connected, that there's dense and multiple connections among them,

and that when you activate what we would think of as a strictly cognitive activity, you're also activating the emotion side of things. You also can study people with different kinds of brain damage, People who've had strokes, for example. And if those strokes affect the emotional parts of the brain, they also have an impact on their thinking. Emotions provide us with useful information, crucial data points that we can use

to inform our responses and our decisions. Yet people vary widely in their ability to identify, understand, and manage emotional signals. Is this capacity innate and fixed or an ability we can cultivate? When we come back, how to sharpen our emotional intelligence. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant.

Have you had times in your life when you, you, or someone you know, handled a situation with exquisite emotional intelligence? Or can you think of a moment when you were, well, an emotional idiot? If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with a hidden brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, emotional intelligence.

Again, that's Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org. Peter Salivay is a psychologist at Yale University. He studies how our emotions shape our decisions and our behavior. Peter, researchers have developed a program intended to help people increase their emotional intelligence. It's called Ruler. I understand this is an acronym. What does it stand for?

So Ruler is an acronym developed by Mark Brackett, who's a professor here at Yale in the Child Study Center, happened to have been my postdoc and my collaborator, Jack Mayer's graduate student years and years ago. And Ruler is an acronym for the skills that he and his colleagues teach kids from kindergarten through high school to become more emotional, intelligent human beings. The first R is recognizing emotion, the ability to know what you're feeling, know what another person is feeling, to recognize emotions through nonverbal cues or verbal ones.

The U is understanding emotion. What does this emotion mean? How does it transition in time? How does it progress? How do small emotions like irritation turn into big ones like rage? How does it affect our thinking and our behavior? What does it motivate us to do? The L is labeling emotions.

Can I use words to describe this emotion to others? Can I reflect someone's feeling back to them using words? Can I identify where emotion words might fit into an emotion space defined by pleasant and unpleasant dimension and an active versus calm dimension. Most emotions and feeling states can be mapped onto those dimensions. The E is expressing emotion. What am I showing on my face when I express an emotion? How do I modulate those expressions when I am in different settings at work versus at home, at a funeral versus at a party. Am I aware of cultural differences

in the way emotions are expressed? It's another part of all of this. Do I understand that in certain cultures, weeping openly is perfectly acceptable and in others a more stoic attitude is expected or that expressing great joy at one's accomplishment might be perfectly acceptable in America, but a little embarrassing in a place like Japan.

The final art is regulating emotion, and this is the area of emotional intelligence that has received the most research attention. A wonderful researcher named James Gross, for example, at Stanford University, who is studying the way in which we manage our emotions. primarily through cognition for decades and decades. And regulating our emotion, we need to remember,

we're regulating our emotion, but we also want to regulate the emotions of others sometimes. Why might I want to cheer myself up? Well, perhaps because I'm going to do something creative. Why might I want to calm myself down? I actually feel less happy. Well, because I might have a task in front of me where I need to be vigilant and careful and slow.

For example, proofreading a manuscript. What about others? When I give a talk, why might I want to tell a joke at the beginning of that talk to manage other people's, regulate other people's emotions before they have to listen to me. So, uh, ruler is recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating. and it forms five kinds of skills that you might want to teach to school children as they learn about their emotions. And it more or less maps onto the four domains that the mesquite,

which is our ability-based emotion test, measures. We organize them slightly differently than Ruler, but you can see the overlap very clearly. I understand that when people ask you how they might, improve their own emotional intelligence, you have a couple of practical suggestions for them, and one sounds like advice from an English teacher, which is to read good literature. Why would reading help us increase our emotional intelligence, Peter? Well, it is an interesting question, because one of the things we know is that your emotional

intelligence can be improved. It's one of the reasons people love the concept of emotional intelligence is because, unlike IQ, which is kind of difficult to change very much after you're a teenager, you can improve your emotional intelligence over the course of your lifetime. Merely aging and gaining life experience typically improves your emotional intelligence. Kind of amazing that way. Now, the difference in terms of how we would go about improving our intelligence, our emotional intelligence, concerns whether we're talking about kids or adults,

for kids teaching these skills directly in the classroom as part of a social, emotional learning program is probably a pretty effective and efficient way to learn these skills. It's a little more difficult as adults to take a class in emotional intelligence. And so we have to look for other ways to do it. I believe, I don't have a lot of data on which to base this, but I believe that's where the arts can really help us. So imagine that when we're reading great literature and trying to understand the motives of characters and why someone is behaving as they are, why they might behave in ways that look conflicted, all of that helps us develop a more sophisticated understanding of emotions,

a greater ability to recognize emotions and label them and maybe even manage them. I think having experiences where you're looking at visual art, looking at, let's say, at paintings in an art museum and reacting to them emotionally might help. In Santander, Spain, there is an entire museum, organized, art museum, organized around the idea of emotions and creativity,

using the art museum experience to practice your emotions. I think listening to music is a great way to practice feeling emotions that you might not feel that often in the outside world. I particularly like theater. And when I was in high school, I was an actor. And I often think theater is a wonderful way because you're watching behavior to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to feel an emotion and how it's connected to thinking and behavior.

You know, in method acting, one of the techniques you might use to create an emotion is actually to enact the behaviors associated with that emotion, and then that emotion might follow. Act as if crying and crying might follow. Well, having those kind of experiences either as an observer or actually being on stage yourself might help you develop a more sophisticated understanding of how our emotions work and how they're connected to behavior and cognition. You know, I'm thinking about the times when we go to a gym and we start working with, you know, different equipment.

And all of a sudden you realize that you had muscles that you didn't know that you had because your body starts to ache and pain in different places. And in some ways, what you're talking about emotions is actually not that different, that in some ways, the more we exercise our emotional repertoire, the more we discover that we have emotional recesses almost, that we haven't really explored, that are worth exploring and strengthening. I think that's exactly right, Chunker. And the more you do it, the better you develop these skills so that empathizing becomes

natural, so that recognizing emotions in someone who is saying something different than their feeling becomes more second nature. so that you develop over time muscles that allow you to take advantage of the data that is inherent in our emotional system. And it becomes, I don't want to sound too woo-woo here, but it becomes kind of like a sixth sense. Yes, we see and we hear and we taste and we smell and we touch, but we also feel our emotions and maybe there's some data there that is being conveyed to us that we should pay attention to.

Why is it that I'm thinking about, well, let's say purchasing a product, but I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach that's a little queasy. Shouldn't I stop and think about why that product made me feel that way? Why is it that I might find myself attracted to another person, and that's accompanied with joy versus it's accompanied by a little bit of worry. What does that tell me? What does that tell me? And so for the most part, people go through life ignoring all of that.

And what I'm suggesting is these are data. And when you ask a friend, let's say, or spouse or family member to roleplay something with you, Tomorrow I'm going to go ask my boss for a raise. When you role play it, you learn how expressing certain words creates certain feelings in you. You learn when your feelings are maybe going to push you in directions you don't want to go. And you can practice modulating those feelings. You can practice regulating them.

You can practice taking a deep breath, pausing, giving yourself a minute to calm. down and then continuing on. Our whole conception of emotional intelligence is that these are skills. You use the metaphor muscle. You can think of these as skills just like an athletic skill where, you know, when you develop those muscles and you take thousands and thousands of foul shots from the basketball foul line, you get better at them. The same is true when you roleplay emotionally evocative situation.

What can I learn from watching the way my body responds, my thoughts change, and my feelings are expressed and have an impact on others? The idea of emotional intelligence isn't new. In fact, you might say it's one of the most popular terms in all of psychology. Managers, parents, teachers all preach the importance of emotional intelligence. Sadly, however, a lot of what you may have heard about this concept, is wrong. In our companion story to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we explore how the enormous popularity of emotional intelligence has spawned a number of myths and misguided notions.

If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled, Emotional Intelligence isn't about being nice. If you're not yet a subscriber, please visit support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co slash hidden brain. You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber-only content, including past episodes. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.com slash hidden brain. Peter Salivay is a psychologist at Yale University. Along with Jack Mayer, he helped coin the concept of emotional intelligence.

Peter has written and co-written several books about emotional intelligence, including the emotionally intelligent manager how to develop and use the four key emotional skills of leadership. Peter, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shuckers. It was a delight for me, and I very much enjoyed our conversation, and I truly enjoy your show. If you have a personal story about emotional intelligence

that you'd be willing to share with a hidden brain audience or a question or comment about the research in this episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org using the subject line, Emotional Intelligence. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Special thanks today to Simon Lindstedt. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brains executive editor. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

See you soon.