Emotional intellignece as defined by Salovey and Mayer is 'the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions'
I like to imagine that emotional intelligence starts with the ability to identify what you are feeling and why; I researched this a bit more and came across a study by one Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished neuroscientist and main contributor to the theory of constructed emotion
As can be seen by the chart below, several factors interact with each other to form a model that produces a 'prescription to action'; or emotion
Being able to recognize this model and being able to apply it to any situation in different ways, e.g. being able to recognize why you or other people are feeling something, is what emotional intelligence is to me.
Or maybe its just what makes us human, the ability to empathize and recognize what other people are trying to communicate.
For a time before the 1990s, emotional intelligence was not favoured over traditional intelligence (it was not even popularly recognized at all); this could be attributed to an overall favouring of STEM over humanities and arts or it could be that sometime before that we lost our humanity and made everything objective. From the absolute value of integers to the constants of physics, everything is set in stone. It is what it truly is. Standardized intelligence tests produced a score of IQ which, loosely translated to 9 year olds, quantified how far you were going in life. We subjected a species with a smorgasbord of different qualities to a one size fits all test.
Now I'm not saying that one is more important than the other, I only argue that traditional intelligence can only get you so far. "Civilizations and societies were built not by one person who knew everything, it was the inherent ability to cooperate and communicate with one another was what made it possible. -Kyle 2022 "
Which is why I argue that emotional intelligence is what makes us human, and the boom of the industrial society has made us focus on the sciences; leaving humanities behind. We have forgotten what it's like to be human in this world, and I think it's important we bring it back before it becomes too late.