When Chen looks back on her time as a PhD student a decade ago, there’s one skill that she wishes she had developed much more than any technical prowess: emotional intelligence. This often-overlooked ability to recognize and manage the emotions of yourself and others might have saved her from years of inner turmoil.

During her PhD, Chen’s supervisor went from paying her little attention to taking a romantic interest in her. The relationship escalated into a toxic but exhilarating affair. “I believed everything he said,” says Chen, who requested a pseudonym for this article to avoid career repercussions. But things fell apart after her postdoctoral studies, when she asked her supervisor to clarify their relationship status so she could make decisions about her own life. The now-former supervisor’s reaction surprised her: “He stopped all communication with me.”

The end of the relationship also had professional consequences. The supervisor reassigned several of Chen’s projects to other students without discussing it with her, she says. When the results of these projects were published as papers and patents, Chen says, she was not included as a co-author or an inventor, despite her contributions. If she had been recognized and acknowledged for her work, Chen thinks, she would be in a “substantially stronger position professionally than I am today”.

The sudden cut-off left Chen confused and heartbroken, affecting her work and her productivity. As she reflects, Chen realizes that her supervisor’s actions were deeply unprofessional and took advantage of her position as a student. However, she adds that having greater emotional intelligence — sometimes known as emotional quotient, or EQ — could have helped her to avoid falling for her supervisor’s false promises or to navigate her heartbreak more effectively during the aftermath.

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Emotional intelligence is a catch-all term for the mix of self-awareness, empathy, social skills and management of feelings that comprises our ability to understand others. It has a reputation for being overlooked as a tool in academia in favour of technical expertise and outward achievement. But it’s key for career success, because it enables people to work effectively with others, says Marc Brackett, a psychologist at Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s therefore a skill that complements many other capabilities. “It helps you deal with all of the barriers to achieving your goals in life,” he adds.

Some universities, including Yale and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, run courses on emotional intelligence. Brackett’s centre aims to help staff to manage difficult emotions and create a supportive learning environment, whereas Harvard’s course focuses on emotional intelligence in leadership roles. But few institutions provide such training specifically for PhD students, laboratory leaders and other academic staff.

There’s still debate about what emotional intelligence is, how to measure it and its role in the workplace, says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organizational psychologist at University College London. And although emotional intelligence has become prized in many fields, its importance might depend on the job in question: it’s probably more important for those who work regularly with others than for those who mostly work alone. “What’s missing about the debate, because of the popularity of the concept, is a little bit of nuance,” says Chamorro-Premuzic.

Heal thyself

Emotional intelligence as a concept was formally introduced by Yale psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer almost four decades ago¹. They described it as a set of skills that enable people to recognize their own and other people’s emotions and use this information to guide their thinking and behaviour. Five years after Salovey and Mayer coined the term, psychologist and New York Times journalist Daniel Goleman popularized the idea and expanded the definition to include social skills, such as empathy and conflict resolution².

Since then, the idea of emotional intelligence has become a messy mixed bag of models, definitions and methods, says Chamorro-Premuzic. The American Psychological Association in Washington DC defines emotional intelligence as the “ability to process emotional information and use it in reasoning and other cognitive activities”.

According to Chamorro-Premuzic, much of the disagreement about what emotional intelligence is has centred around whether it’s truly a skill or simply “personality rebranded”. Some models define emotional intelligence as a set of cognitive skills that can be picked up by anyone, whereas others approach it more as a fundamentally innate trait. Still others present it as a combination of the two.

Some researchers are taking the definition a step further. Camila Devis-Rozental, a learning-design researcher at Bournemouth University, UK, who focuses on well-being in higher education, coined the term ‘socio-emotional intelligence’, which includes ‘social responsibility’ — a moral compass that guides people towards making a positive impact on those around them³.

Despite the varied definitions, emotional intelligence has become a “darling of the human-resources world”, says Chamorro-Premuzic. Several studies⁴ support its glowing status as an essential skill in the workplace: people with high emotional intelligence experience greater career success, more job satisfaction and are more innovative than their less emotionally intelligent colleagues. Research also suggests that emotional intelligence is an important ingredient for effective leadership and helps to build strong relationships.

But higher emotional intelligence doesn’t always lead to better outcomes across the board, says Chamorro-Premuzic. For instance, although some research suggests that emotional intelligence is related to creativity⁵, other evidence hints that traits often linked to emotional intelligence, such as agreeableness and conscientiousness, are negatively correlated with it⁶. People with high emotional intelligence might also be reluctant to challenge the status quo or make bold choices, he adds.

The thinking goes that such people tend to be respectful and focused on getting along with others rather than shaking things up, he explains. Furthermore, workplaces that place too much value on emotional intelligence can end up sidelining talented, high-performing people who might be neurotic, grumpy or lack social skills, he adds.