Emotional Intelligence Posted on February 28, 2008 Peter Salovey (bio) explains how the publication of Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence caused a shift in his own career.

I think through the faculty years I worked primarily in two areas: health communication and how to use the principles of social psychology to motivate people to engage in health behaviors that would help prevent or detect cancer or HIV/AIDS, and then I continued to work on emotions, really the work that started as an undergraduate with David Rosenhan, still looking at the consequences that emotions have for thinking, reasoning, problem solving, and especially social behavior and social relationships.

And over time that grew into our research program on Emotional Intelligence and emotional competencies. We were noticing individual differences and the way in which people integrated their emotions with their thinking and the way in which they used their emotions to motivate behavior, and over time that turned into the Emotional Intelligence line of work.

We began writing on Emotional Intelligence with a publication in 1990 that didn't attract very much notice, but Jack Mayer and I continued collaborating and thinking about the idea. In 1995 Daniel Goleman, who’s a psychologist and a journalist, published a book that used the phrase “Emotional Intelligence” in its title, and that book became one of the best selling books of popular psychology of all time, and all of a sudden people started to contact us about our research that was described in the book.

And that caused a bit of a career shift at that point, too: much more public speaking, much more interest in international collaborations, and the like. And that was and continues to be a lot of fun.

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