INEMOTION - EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE: EDUCATIONAL TOOL FOR DEVELOPING KEY COMPETENCES

Modern societies of the 21st century are immersed in a growing complexity that implies great development and opportunities, but also certain costs and difficulties. Different studies that evaluate and compare the quality of life of both adults and children in different dimensions indicate that economic development, wealth and GDP are not always accompanied by similar levels of well-being and happiness. For example, a country like the United States with impressive levels of wealth and technological development has one of the lowest wellbeing rates in developed countries. Europe is not exempt from these contradictions and the population suffers serious physical and mental health problems, as well as psychological and social maladjustment such as suicide, violence, or addictions that have a very negative impact on the well-being of our society. From this perspective, some countries have reacted by realizing that education in the 21st century must assume a double mission and educate both the head and the heart, the academic and intellectual side, but also the emotional and social side. In the United States, for example, one of the most active movements in this line of action is the CASEL organization that promotes Emotional and Social Learning in society (“Social and Emotional Learning” SEL; see www.CASEL.org). The SEL principles are proposed as an integrative framework to coordinate all the specific programmes that are applied under the assumption that most of the problems that affect people are caused by the same emotional and social risk factors. Therefore, the best way to prevent these specific problems would be through the practical development of emotional and social skills at the earliest age possible. That is, starting from childhood in school and continuing throughout the life cycle in both our personal and professional lives. SEL programmes are based on the concept of Emotional Intelligence developed by scientists Peter Salovey (Yale University) and John Mayer (University of New Hampshire) in 1990 and disseminated with great success by the popularizer Daniel Goleman in 1995. Specifically, influenced by the works of professors Peter Salovey and John Mayer, we have the scientific explanation to a fact that we all witness on a daily basis: being brilliant academically does not always imply that professional and personal success is achieved. The academic training of an engineer, for example, develops his intellectual, spatial and abstract capacity, but not his emotional and social skills. However, usually, this professional will have to work with other people as a team and for this he will need to master these skills in an effective way. For us, following the EI Model of Mayer and Salovey (1997), emotional intelligence is defined as: «Emotional intelligence involves the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth». In short, EI is specified in four basic skills: • Perception and emotional expression: ability to perceive emotions, as well as the ability to express them properly. • Emotional facilitation: ability to generate feelings and emotions that facilitate decision making and problem solving. • Emotional comprehension: ability to integrate what we feel into our emotional knowledge. 7 • Emotional regulation: capacity for acceptance and emotional regulation, that is, being open to positive and negative emotional states, to reflect on the information that accompanies them, as well as being able to modify both one's own emotions and those of other people. These abilities are linked to each other in such a way that for an adequate emotional regulation a good emotional understanding is necessary and, in turn, for an effective understanding we require an appropriate emotional perception. Research on EI worldwide has focused on three main lines of interest: • Construction of tools for the evaluation of Emotional Intelligence for adults, children and teenagers. • Analysis of the impact of Emotional Intelligence in different areas such as: physical and psychological health, drug use, adaptation to stressful situations, interpersonal functioning, behaviors of aggression and violence, or well-being and happiness. • Development of Emotional Intelligence improvement programmes for children, teenagers, and adults in different personal and professional contexts. However, one of the main priorities is that the education of emotions be rigorously included in the education system as a priority in Europe. Recent international studies show that EI improvement programmes in schools have long-term positive effects on psychological adjustment, social relationships, disruptive and violent behaviors, as well as on people's academic performance. In this process, emotional education also has to inevitably consider the improvement of the EI of adults who did not have the opportunity to receive it during their initial or professional training. 21st century scientific knowledge provides us with the necessary and most effective arguments and tools to educate the emotional and social skills, both in childhood and in adult life. Therefore, educating emotions in Europe is not a utopia for the future, but a reality that is already happening in many schools that needs to be extended to the adult and professional world through political and social will. Therefore, we are convinced that an explicit and rigorous development of the education of emotional and social aspects is the only way to create a developed and rich society, but above all a society with healthy and happy adults.