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Love,
Manufactured Feelings, Priorities, Emotional Intelligence
I was just going to write
about emotional intelligence tests, religion, Christians,
Muslims and Jews… then I found some writing which
Laura had started. (If you don't know, Laura is from Peru
and we were living and traveling together. She has now
gone back to Peru and I am in Argentina. There is a link
to her page below, as are all the links.) Reading what
she wrote changed my mood, re-directed my thoughts. I
can't just go back to writing about EI tests now. Not in
the same way.
I think of David Caruso and his concept of using
emotions.
The more I think about David, the more I think he has led
people away from the original concept of emotinal
intelligence as Mayer and Salovey have written about it.
I don't really want to write about emotional intelligence
though now. I want to write about Laura. Or actually I
want to hug Laura. I want to hold her and cry and tell
her I am sorry. I want to apologize for not being able to
give her what she needs.
She's such a beautiful
person. I'm crying now and I didn't just manufacture that
feeling.
That is what David Caruso wants us to do, evidently.
Manufacture feelings. Which reminds me of the term
"manufactured consent."
Oh, David, you are getting so far away from what
emotional intelligence could mean to the world...
Ok, I will try to write about the original idea I had
before reading what Laura wrote. I have somewhat
satisfied my need to talk about her and my feelings of
love for her. But I also want to remind you that Mayer
and or Salovey said that our feelings prioritize our
thoughts to what is most important to think about. (See
the emotional facilitation part, branch 2, of their
model)
In my case, my feelings of sadness and love re-directed
my thoughts. And maybe if I were more emotionally
intelligent I would stop writing and instead start
packing my things and go back to Peru and try to find
Laura and try to change my priorities to put love in a
higher ranking.
I am so tempted to do just that.
But for better worse, my writing is important to me.
While Laura was here I kept wanting to write. I spent a
lot of time with her, probably too much actually, but I
also felt a need to keep writing. I don't know if this
need to write is more a product of evolution or of the
abuse I received in the first 20 or so years of my life.
Actually, it went on till about 35 probably when I
finally distanced myself psychologically from my family,
especially my emotionally abusive brother.
Anyhow, David Caruso thinks that it is a sign of
emotional intelligence to be able to manufacture
feelings.
For example, he has a question on the MSCEIT test about
trying to write an inspiring military march. He asks
something like "What feelings would be helpful in
trying to write an inspiring war march?"
As I think about it now, would the feeling of love and
compassion be helpful? Probably not.
But would these feelings be helpful to humanity?
Probably.
Where David misses an important point is that he fails to
take a world view. I have criticized him before for this.
David is simply too American. He is too patriotic and too
much a product of his environment. I have written about
this on the pages where I discuss my concerns about his
ability to design an objective test of emotional
intelligence.
This is somewhat related to what I originally wanted to
write about this morning…. The idea of how can we
tell what is a "good" test of emotional
intelligence?
Jack Mayer unfortunately seems to have gotten caught up
in the numbers of trying to validate or perfect his test
of EI. I took a quick look at his site the other day to
see what he has been publishing recently and it is all
about the statistics of his MSCEIT test. Validity,
reliability etc. I am afraid Jack has forgotten his own
reasons for writing about the concept of emotional
intelligence in the first place. I think Jack made a
mistake in inviting David to help him design a test of
emotional intelligence. I don't know how much it was
Jack's idea to create a test of EI or how much it was
Peter's, but I talk more about Jack because a) I know him
better and b) I have more respect for him than I do for
Peter. Peter seems too interested in money. I say this
because of a personal experience I had with him and also
because of his article about the stock market in the
Ciarocci et al book. Also, I believe Jack has a higher
level of respect for me than Peter does, partly because I
think Jack and I have a bit more in common and partly
because we have met in person and got along quite well.
Anyhow, I was thinking more about Geetu's letter. She
thinks I am not representing the concept of emotional
intelligence very well on my site. But she and I have
different ideas about what it is and is not. And she
doesn't seem to understand that one important thing I
want to do with my site is to criticize the
Goleman/BarOn/Caruso model of emotional intelligence. I
may start calling this the GBC model from now on.
After writing that much, I
then wrote this next editorial, which was what I was
originally thinking about before I found Laura's
writing...
How
do we know what emotional intelligence is?
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