THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE: FROM MIND TO FEELINGS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/cusu-psy-2025-4-1Keywords:
emotional intelligence, emotion, cognition, empathy, psychology of emotionAbstract
This article examines the psychological foundations of emotional intelligence and traces its development through major shifts in twentieth-century psychology. Following the evolution from the cognitive revolution to integrative models of mind, the paper explores how leading thinkers redefined the relationship between reason and emotion. During the 1950s and 1960s, the cognitive revolution portrayed the mind as a logical and systematic information processor. Yet even at the height of this rationalist view, researchers began to question whether thought could exist apart from emotion. They discovered that feeling was not an obstacle to reason but an essential element of how people think, decide, and create. Within this changing perspective, H. Simon’s concept of bounded rationality showed that emotion helps guide decision-making when information and time are limited. G. Miller and U. Neisser demonstrated that cognition depends on meaning and experience, revealing the mind as more than a mechanical system. S. Tomkins’s Affect Theory and P. Ekman’s studies of facial expressions further established that emotion is biological, motivational, and communicative – the foundation of human connection and empathy. Later, H. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences recognized intrapersonal and interpersonal understanding as distinct yet vital forms of intelligence. Together, these developments transformed psychology into a more integrated science of mind and emotion, preparing the conceptual ground for emotional intelligence as a unified model of cognition and affect. The study argues that emotional intelligence did not emerge abruptly but evolved through decades of work aimed at integrating cognition, emotion, and social understanding. It represents psychology’s enduring effort to view intelligence not only as the ability to reason but also as the capacity to feel, to understand others, and to act with empathy.
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