How Feelings Make Us Smarter

Summary

---

Hidden Brain – “How Feelings Make Us Smarter”

Host: Shankar Vedantam
Guest: Dr. Peter Salovey (Yale University)
Date: August 10, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Shankar Vedantam explores a central paradox: why some of the most intellectually brilliant people, like chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, struggle with basic emotional and social navigation. The discussion centers on emotional intelligence – what it is, why it matters, and how it can be cultivated. Through stories from Dr. Peter Salovey’s career and research, listeners are shown how emotions are not obstacles to success, but a vital source of intelligence that shapes decision-making, creativity, and our relationships.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Logic of Emotion vs. Pure Rationality

• The Bobby Fischer Example (00:00–02:56)

  • Fischer’s chess brilliance contrasted with his inability to manage emotions and relationships. This story anchors the theme that raw intellect does not guarantee emotional competence.

• Challenging the Traditional View (02:56–03:44)

  • Shankar: “It feels like our emotions are obstacles to our success… But research in recent decades…suggests that this idea is profoundly wrong. Emotions are central to our ability to understand, attend, and to prioritize.”
  • Emotions are presented not as distractions but as essential tools for reasoning and decision-making.

---

Presidential Empathy: Bill Clinton’s Handshake

• The Power of Reading a Room (03:44–08:19)

  • Dr. Salovey recounts meeting Bill Clinton at Yale and feeling nervous. Clinton eases the tension by referring to a prior (incidental) encounter—Salovey cutting off Clinton’s limo in traffic.
  • Quote (Peter Salovey, 07:08):
    “It was a wonderful example of President Clinton managing my emotions. He could see I was nervous…he knows it might put me at ease or at least make us feel familiar and like old friends.”

• Implication:

  • Emotional intelligence is the ability to quickly sense and respond to the emotional states of others.

---

Leading Through Emotion: The Calhoun College Naming Controversy

• The Campus Conflict (08:19–18:41)

  • Dr. Salovey, as Yale’s president, chooses initially to keep the college’s controversial name (Calhoun College) but “contextualize” it, drawing student protest.
  • A student’s metaphor—living in a “shrine to slavery”—provokes a deep emotional realization for Salovey.
  • Quote (Peter Salovey, 16:28):
    “I had a moment of emotional understanding and deep empathy...thinking about that student living in a shrine to slavery...It was a shift in my thinking, and it was really a processing of those emotions…that created a moment of clarity for me.”
  • Yale eventually changes the name to Grace Hopper College.

• Insight:

  • Empathy and emotional understanding can drive leaders toward wiser, more just decisions.

---

Defining and Measuring Emotional Intelligence

• Origins of the Concept (21:58–24:18)

  • The term "emotional intelligence" (“EI”) is coined by Salovey and Jack Mayer – not in a lab, but while painting a living room.
  • Quote (Peter Salovey, 23:16):
    “We were just chatting as we painted…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 emotions and their effect on thinking and behavior.”

• The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT/Mesquite) (24:18–26:53)

  • Emotional intelligence is measured through tests that assess skills like recognizing emotions, managing them, and empathy.
  • High EI scores correlate with having more friends, being rated as more sociable, and engaging in pro-social behavior.

---

The Consequences of Emotional Intelligence in Life & Work

• Benefits for Young People (26:53–28:41)

  • Higher EI predicts lower likelihood of drug/alcohol use and delinquent behavior in adolescents, as well as staying in school.

• Benefits at Work (28:41–32:11)

  • In workplace studies, EI predicts job performance, promotions, and the ability to regulate one’s own emotions—a defining trait of effective managers.
  • Memorable Story (29:38–32:11):
    • At a high-powered bank, everyone’s IQ and technical skills are strong, but only a handful get promoted. Emotional intelligence—not analytic ability—is the differentiator.

---

The Science: Emotion and Cognition Are Connected

• Brain Research Findings (32:11–33:39)
  • FMRI studies show regions for emotion and cognition are deeply interconnected; strokes that damage emotional processing impair rational thinking, too.

---

Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned?

• The RULER Program (36:29–40:43)

  • Developed by Dr. Salovey’s collaborator Mark Brackett, RULER stands for:
    • Recognizing emotion
    • Understanding emotion
    • Labeling emotions
    • Expressing emotion
    • Regulating emotion
  • Taught from K–12, but principles apply for adults.

• Practical Ways to Build Emotional Intelligence (40:43–47:57)

  • Salovey’s Tips:

    • Read good literature – “Trying to understand the motives of characters…helps us develop a more sophisticated understanding of emotions.” (41:01–42:11)
    • Engage with the arts, theater, music, visual art – offer safe ways to practice and experience emotions.
    • Practice role-plays – builds self-awareness and regulation “like exercising a muscle.”

  • Quote (Peter Salovey, 44:49):
    “The more you do it, the better you develop these skills. So that empathizing becomes natural…So that you develop, over time, muscles that allow you to take advantage of the data that is inherent in our emotional system.”

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Emotions as Tools, not Obstacles:
  “They aren’t obstacles that block our path. They are food and fuel for the journey.” — Shankar Vedantam (02:56)

• On Empathy in Leadership:
  “It was a shift in my thinking and it was really a processing of those emotions triggered by my interaction with the student…that created a moment of clarity…” — Peter Salovey (16:40)

• On Measuring EI:
  “For our participants who scored well on the mesquite, the stranger rated them more highly…They are the kinds of individuals who you would love to have as a friend.” — Peter Salovey (24:54–26:53)

• On Skills vs. Innate Traits:
  “You can improve your emotional intelligence over the course of your lifetime. Merely aging and gaining life experience typically improves your emotional intelligence.” — Peter Salovey (41:01)

• The ‘Sixth Sense’ of Emotion:
  “It becomes kind of like a sixth sense...we also feel our emotions. And maybe there’s some data there that is being conveyed to us that we should pay attention to.” — Peter Salovey (44:49)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 — Chess prodigy Bobby Fischer: genius meets emotional ineptitude
• 03:44 — Peter Salovey meets President Clinton: a demonstration of emotional attunement
• 08:19 — Calhoun College naming controversy: empathy and emotional clarity drive policy change
• 21:58 — History and definition of emotional intelligence
• 24:18 — How EI is measured (MSCEIT/Mesquite)
• 26:53 — EI’s impact on youth behavior
• 28:41 — EI in the workplace and leadership
• 32:11 — Brain research: cognition and emotion intertwined
• 36:29 — The RULER program for schools
• 40:43 — Practical strategies to build emotional intelligence
• 44:49 — Emotions as a sixth sense; “muscle” metaphor for EI skills

---

Episode Tone

Warm, inquisitive, and personal—combining insightful research with human stories. Dr. Salovey’s humility and Shankar’s curiosity invite listeners to see feelings not as liabilities, but as resources that can and should be cultivated.

---

Takeaways

• Emotional Intelligence (EI) is as vital as IQ for decision-making, leadership, and healthy relationships.
• EI can be measured, taught, and strengthened across the lifespan.
• Reflecting on, labeling, and learning from our emotional experience is crucial for creativity, health, and wisdom.
• Practicing empathy, arts engagement, and role-play are valuable ways to build emotional “muscle.”

---

“Emotions are not primitive vestiges; they are part of how we reason, prioritize, connect, and lead.” – The spirit of ‘How Feelings Make Us Smarter’

Transcript

[Shankar Vedantam]

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In October 1967, the world's greatest chess minds gathered in Suesse, 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 Fischer. He was a 24 year old Grandmaster with an IQ rumored 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 Fischer 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 Fischer's brilliance. Throughout his career, he operated in a state of constant relational friction, alienating the very coaches and friends who tried 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 Fischer possessed a mind that could see a dozen moves ahead on a chessboard. 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.

[Advertisement Voice]

Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

[Shankar Vedantam]

I remember telling my boss it'll be

[Peter Salovey]

good for the brand when leads were slow.

[Shankar Vedantam]

Yeah, it wasn't.

[Advertisement Voice]

Cut the bull. Spend LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a dollar. Go to LinkedIn.com Campaign terms and conditions apply.

[Peter Salovey]

It's like math. McDonald's is now introducing all new Caesar sauce plus an even crispier McCrispy strip. This all equals a creamier creamy snack wrap. Try the new caesar sauce at McDonald's. Hey, I've got the campaign brief ready. Built from last quarter's data and the competitive landscape.

[Advertisement Voice]

Approved. Oh, agents, where would we be without you?

[Peter Salovey]

Somewhere with a lot more tabs open.

[Advertisement Voice]

Create your first Monday agent in [e-mail].

[Shankar Vedantam]

think back to the last time you made a decision you regretted. 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 the way of our rational minds. But research in recent decades into the world of emotions suggests that this idea is, 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 Salovey, welcome to Hidden Brain.

[Peter Salovey]

Thank you so much, Shankar. It's a real honor to be with you. I listen to your show regularly and have enjoyed seeing you live as well, and so it's a privilege to be a guest.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 or with the president?

[Peter Salovey]

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. We 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 Salovey, 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

So when he said that you had met earlier, had you actually met him earlier?

[Peter Salovey]

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, in my interaction at that point.

[Shankar Vedantam]

So something happened earlier that day that is pertinent to what Bill Clinton told you. Tell me what happened earlier that morning.

[Peter Salovey]

PETER yeah, so as I was coming onto 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 is the Dean. And I realized he had been reviewing the people he was going to meet in his car, most likely as a public. 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. He 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 could see I'm nervous. No need to be nervous. We're old friends, he says. And in fact, the old friend 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 or at least make us feel familiar and like old friends.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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.

[Peter Salovey]

We had a residential college named for John C. Kellon, was 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 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

And I imagine he must have gone to Yale himself if a building was named after him.

[Peter Salovey]

Yeah, he had 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 John C. 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 protests, 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. Calhoun. 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. 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

So early on, as this controversy was brewing, you decided that the name should not be changed. Talk about the moment you actually announced this to the campus and what the reaction was.

[Peter Salovey]

Peter sure. Well, 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 naacp, prominent African 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 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 calling for a different outcome.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 donors and the alumni than the well being of students. And that must have come as something of a shock to you.

[Peter Salovey]

That, of course, was a shock to me. 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, 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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?

[Peter Salovey]

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 effacing 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. Calhoun, 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 artifacts 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 face 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

What did you end up doing?

[Peter Salovey]

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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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.

[Advertisement Voice]

Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard but not the pipeline? That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

[Shankar Vedantam]

My boss asked for results so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had impression Cut the bullspend.

[Advertisement Voice]

See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad NETWORKS. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com campaign terms and conditions apply.

[Peter Salovey]

It's like math. McDonald's is now introducing all new Caesar sauce plus an even crispier McCrispy strip. This all equals a creamier creamy snack wrap. Try the new caesar sauce at McDonald's.

[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 Salovey is a psychologist at Yale University. He studies how our emotions shape our decisions and our behavior. Peter, your research tackles a Long standing belief of Western culture that thinking and feeling are opposing forces in the mind. Talk a moment about the long history of that idea.

[Peter Salovey]

Yes. Whether you're looking at 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 is 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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.

[Peter Salovey]

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 room. We had 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. Whether you could measure any of this. And so we came together in that way. Yes. And it was while painting our. Painting my. My house.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 Salovey Caruso Scale, or mesquite for short.

[Peter Salovey]

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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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?

[Peter Salovey]

Yeah, that's right. We've shown correlations between mesquite scores and the likelihood of using drugs or alcohol, particularly in adolescents. 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,

[Advertisement Voice]

what

[Peter Salovey]

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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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.

[Peter Salovey]

One small study we did was at an insurance company where we measured traditional intelligence, we measured personality, and we also gave them a skeet, 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. We're at a huge advantage in the workplace.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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?

[Peter Salovey]

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 conversations, at the beginning of our sessions, how many of you feel that you are above average in iq? And every hand would go up. 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 up. 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 emotions. 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

I understand Peter that some research has also employed brain scanning to study the brain activity of people as they solve emotion related problems.

[Peter Salovey]

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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 Vedanta.

[Advertisement Voice]

Everyone's talking about protein lately but how do you actually get enough of it? Muscle Milk Muscle Milk has a great tasting new formula with no artificial sweeteners, flavors or added colors. It's high quality complete protein designed to support healthy muscles with fewer ingredients than the previous formula and 2642 grams of protein. For when you're stuck in meetings or need a post workout recovery. Available in chocolate, vanilla, cream, cookies and cream and strawberries and cream. Try the new great tasting Muscle Milk today available in stores nationwide. Muscle Milk Protein for all. This is a Monday.com ad the samemonday.com helping people worldwide getting work done faster and better. The samemonday.com designed for every team and every industry. The samemonday.com with built in AI scaling your work from day one. The same Monday.com that your team will actually love. Using the samemonday.com with an easy and intuitive setup. Go to Monday.com and try it for free. Yes the same Monday.com

[Shankar Vedantam]

this is hidden brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Have you had times in your life when you or someone you know handle the situation with exquisite emotional intelligence? Or can you think of a moment when you are, 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 [e-mail] use the subject line emotional intelligence. Again, that's feedbackiddenbrain.org Peter Salovey 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?

[Peter Salovey]

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 non verbal cues or verbal ones. The you is understanding emotion. What does this emotion mean? How does it a 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 R 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, 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 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 demands that the mesquite, which is our ability based motion test measures. We organize them slightly differently than ruler, but you can see the overlap very clearly.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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, but which is to read good literature. Why would reading help us increase our emotional intelligence?

[Advertisement Voice]

Peter?

[Peter Salovey]

Well, it is an interesting question because one of the things we know is that your emotional intelligence can be improved. 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 are 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 help you learn, develop a more sophisticated understanding of how our emotions work and how they're connected to behavior and cognition.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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. 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.

[Peter Salovey]

I think that's exactly right, Shankar. 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 they're 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 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 role play 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 role play emotionally evocative situations. 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?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 HiddenBrain. You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber only content, including past episodes. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org and Apple Co HiddenBrain. Peter Salovey 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 how to Develop and Use the Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership. Peter, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

[Peter Salovey]

Thank you Shankar. It was a delight for me and I very much enjoyed our conversation and I truly enjoy your show.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 [e-mail] using the subject line emotional intelligence. Again, that's feedbackiddenbrain.org Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy, Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerell, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Special thanks today to Simon Linstedt. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.