KVIG Informative

Emotional intelligence started as a research idea in 1990, not a self-help slogan. Psychologists define it as a set of measurable abilities, and some schools now teach those abilities on purpose.

The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence traces the idea to the summer of 1987, when Peter Salovey, later Yale’s president, and John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire noticed that theories of intelligence had no systematic place for emotion. Salovey studied emotions and behavior. Mayer studied the link between emotions and thought. Their 1990 paper introduced the term emotional intelligence.

Salovey and Mayer defined it as a cluster of specific abilities: accurately identifying feelings, using emotions to support thinking, understanding and naming emotions, and managing them well. The Yale center today describes it as the ability to navigate one’s own and other people’s emotions to reach meaningful goals. Marc Brackett, who directs the center, has argued that much of the popular discussion after Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book diluted those underlying skills, which is why the research definition matters.

How the Skills Get Taught Brackett and Yale colleagues built a school program called RULER, launched in 2005. The name stands for five skills: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions. It grew from an emotional literacy program that a teacher, Marvin Maurer, developed in the early 1970s. Maurer was Brackett’s uncle. Yale reports that RULER is now used in thousands of preK-12 schools in the United States and abroad.

What Research Reports Studies of RULER, including work by Brackett himself, have reported benefits for classroom climate, academics, and social-emotional skills. Because some of that research comes from the program’s developers, independent replication carries extra weight, and readers evaluating any school program can reasonably ask who conducted the study and whether other teams have reproduced the results.

Nevada’s Version The Nevada Department of Education publishes state social-emotional learning standards built on five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. The department describes social-emotional learning as the ongoing process of developing skills to understand and manage emotions, make thoughtful decisions, and sustain meaningful relationships. It suggests schools reinforce the standards in three ways: weaving them into academic lessons, teaching them explicitly, and involving families and community partners.

The five Nevada competencies line up closely with the research abilities Salovey and Mayer described. Self-awareness corresponds to identifying feelings. Self-management corresponds to regulating them. Social awareness and relationship skills extend the same abilities to other people, and responsible decision-making is where emotion and thinking meet.

Emotional intelligence, in this research sense, is a set of skills rather than a personality trait, and skills can be taught, practiced, and measured. The rest of this series looks at what the evidence says about teaching them, how the arts connect to the same brain systems, and why student wellbeing shapes how well any of it works.