Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Emotional Literacy

At first, what is emotional literacy? It can be defined as the ability to manage yourself and your own emotions and to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
Why it is important, is it useful to be well-literate? Answer is accurate - Yes. Most political leaders use emotional techniques to affect electors. However, not only political leaders need to be experts in this area - If you want to be a good businessman relationship between workers and the management must be very good. Researchers found out that emotional literacy is one of the most important factors of learning, so more and more psychologist are needed at schools. Nevertheless, there is one problem - it is difficult to teach pupils (and other people with weak emotional literacy) how to express their feelings and emotions because their emotional needs are different. All people share the main needs (as need of water, food or sleep, freedom or security...) but each differs in the strength of the need.
Nowadays we can measure our emotional literacy by tests. I tried one myself and I was satisfied by results - my EQ was quite high (research shows that those with high EQ are better at reading non-verbal cues). The words I'm used to use in order to describe my emotions are typical to people with the level of emotional literacy as mine. There are a lot of words discribing feelings for example, comfortable (uncomfortable), accepted (rejected), loved (resentful) and so on.
Finally, I can say that some people express their feelings easier and it is much more difficult to others - this is one of the main factors of emotional literacy. We make things much easier when our language is clear and direct, so it is important to be well-literate in emotions in order to benefit from the life.



1 comment:

rbrazinskaite said...

It was interesting to read this composition, because I could'n find much information about emotional literacy and this article was very informative and useful for psychology. Furthermore, if you got a high EI test degree, so you must be a good psychologist, because psychology must involve such skills.