Emotional intelligence and the identification of emotion

This article is concerned with individual differences in the ability to connect thoughts to emotions. People who are good at connecting thoughts to feelings may better ''hear'' the emotional implications of their own thoughts, as well as understand the feelings of others from what they say. We had 321 participants read the writings of a target group of people and guess what those targets had felt. Several criteria were used to evaluate the participants' emotional recognition abilities, including agreement with the group consensus and agreement with the target. Participants who agreed more highly with the group consensus and with the target also scored higher than the other participants on scales of empathy and self-reported SAT scores, and lower on emotional defensiveness. Such results are interpreted to mean that some forms of emotional problem solving require emotional openness as well as general intelligence.