It Started With Family Posted on April 10, 2008 Marc Brackett (bio) explains how his early experiences with education led to working with Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey.

My original interest in this came from the coauthor of my middle school curriculum, who is my uncle. And my uncle, who had been teaching curriculum that he developed on his own that never were published, just his own little ideas that he had back in the sixties and seventies in upstate New York.

And one day, we started talking, and I was about to go for my PhD. And I had read stuff on emotional intelligence, and I decided that’s what I’m getting my PhD in. And I was only going to get my PhD if I were to work with one of the founders of this theory.

So I applied, got in, and got my PhD with Jack Mayer, who was the cofounder of the theory of emotional intelligence along with Peter Salovey. And right before I was going, I said, “You know, [Uncle] Marv, I think what you were doing in schools is like the hottest thing now. People are talking about it, and I think it’s actually really highly related to this thing called emotional intelligence.”

And so I had sort of become an expert in the area by getting my PhD in the area, and then we decided we’re going to write this curriculum together. My expertise in the area of emotions and emotion skills and their relationship to social skills and mental health and performance and his expertise as being a real teacher who had done this in 25, 30 years.

Got my PhD and then got a job as a post-doctoral fellow at Yale working with Peter Salovey, and then really started changing my career into not only understanding emotional intelligence but, really, how do you test it and how do you develop it?

And what happened is we started having sort of new views about what it means to be emotionally intelligent and emotionally literate. And I started making the claims with my new colleague, Susan Rivers, that we really are talking about emotional literacy here. We’re talking about skills and knowledge that needs to be gained.

We all come to the plate with varying degrees of how much we know about emotion. And if you come from a family where your parents talk to you about emotion and they teach you strategies, you’re going to be able to be a little bit better off. Most of us don’t have that.

So that’s where this sort of theory that I’ve come up with with Susan Rivers on emotional literacy came out of. And what happened is that we started doing our work in schools and just getting amazing feedback. Teachers liked it. Students liked it. And literally, just overnight, things started rolling really, really fast.

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