I did it! I passed my master's program. I worked really hard on that paper. My CAPSTONE. I only had 9 weeks to get it done from beginning to the end. I wrote about emotional intelligence.
My question was: How do first-year college students describe the relationship between their emotional awareness and their ability to communicate clearly and confidently?
There were only three interviews. I found out, through the literature review that there are two sides to emotional intelligence. Well, three if you count the opposite. One, emotional intelligence is the thing to look for when interviewing others for a job. School prepares you for the career, but emotional intelligence gets you the job. When there are a hundred people vying for the same position as you and they have just as much education as you, what do employers look for? Emotional intelligence is what they look for.
But...there is a caveat to this. If you have too much emotional intelligence, you are either going to be manipulative without remorse or you are going to be too emotionally gullible that you cannot see that you are being manipulated and you overestimate another's honesty.
This dark side to emotional intelligence is called the Dark Triad. It is Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Together or separate. Either one is bad news.
That is exactly why I developed a group that I call emotional intelligence. Here the clients learn in a multisensory activity obscure emotions to help increase their emotional vocabulary giving them insight into what others are trying to make them feel. When they know this, then they can work to defend themselves against the Dark Triad.
I made flashcards. One side has the emotion and the other side has the definition. Then I pair it with music videos that get stopped every so often so that we can read the top emotion after shuffling the cards to the music. Everyone reads their top card. Some groups are small and others quite large. Everyone gets a turn. Sometimes we say something about the emotion and how it affects a person, especially one handling their low level of mental health.
One day, I hope to have flashcards made for this instead of making them myself on index cards. There are about 3000 emotions in my emotion dictionary. I only have gotten halfway through the B's. I plan to use this downtime from school to make more. I am slowly gathering a following. I hope that they benefit somehow from this activity.
Take a look at my link page. It is titled, Vocabulary ABC's in mental health circles. It has various links including whitehouse.gov and the surgeon general. It also has a link to the DSM5. If you found any of this blog helpful, please share it. I only have this many views by word of mouth.