Traditional definitions of intelligence have always tended to emphasize cognitive aspects like memory and problem solving. In 1920, American psychologist Edward Thorndike first coined the term social intelligence to describe the skill of understanding and managing people. In 1983, another American psychologist, Howard Gardener, wrote the influential book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, where he described interpersonal intelligence as the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people and intra-personal intelligence as the capacity to understand one’s own feelings, fears and motivations. Research on the subject gathered momentum through the 1980s, especially after the publication of Emotional Intelligence : Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman of Harvard University, where he popularized the term EQ, which is the measure EI. The idea captured the public imagination and soon, every other magazine was putting out EQ tests for their readers. Goleman himself approved an “unscientific” test in USA Today, with choices like “I am aware of even subtle feelings as I have them.”
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