Emotional Intelligence, Controlling Emotions & Personality
What many people seem to get wrong about emotional intelligence and generally the controlling of emotions. Also, why the concept of emotional intelligence is mostly discredited and is not believed to be an actual form of intelligence.

What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence (EQ), also known as emotional quotient, refers to the ability to perceive, understand, and manage one’s own emotions and relationships. It involves being aware of emotions in oneself and others, using this awareness to guide thinking and behaviour.
Key Supposed Signs of Emotional Intelligence
Identifying and describing what people are feeling.
Awareness of personal strengths and limitations.
Self-confidence and self-acceptance. Self-confidence is highly linked to being high in the traits of extroversion and neuroticism.
Letting go of mistakes.
Embracing change. Embracing change could be linked to being high in trait openness.
Curiosity about other people. High extroversion and agreeableness are associated with an interest in people vs things.
Empathy and concern for others. This can be explained by high agreeableness and a strong interest in people rather than things.
Sensitivity to others’ feelings. High agreeableness and possibly high neuroticism link to this.
Accepting responsibility for mistakes.
Managing emotions in difficult situations. This is strongly associated with the trait of neuroticism. If someone is low in neuroticism, they have little emotions to control.
Many of the above signs of emotional intelligence are heavily influenced and largely explained by personality traits on the Big Five. Most personality psychologists believe these traits are largely determined by our biology. Recent developments in personality psychology have largely discredited the idea of emotional intelligence as an actual form of intelligence. The most solid research on intelligence suggests that there are only two aspects of intelligence. These are fluid and crystallized intelligence.
Personality traits have a great impact on almost all the listed associations of emotional intelligence. This makes the concept almost entirely redundant.
Psychopathic Personality Example
Psychopaths are a good example of why the idea of emotional intelligence is wrong. Because by the standards of supposed high emotional intelligence, a psychopath would be extremely emotionally intelligent. Psychopaths not only lack empathy and compassion, they also lack feelings of guilt or regret. They also don’t feel stress and pressure in the same way. In fact, they may often thrive from it. This is why there is a disproportionally high number of psychopaths in positions of power and authority, including company CEOs.
Psychopaths don’t need to control their emotions, they don’t have emotions. There is nothing to control. This biological factor is a fundamental cause that fuels the misconception about controlling emotions. It’s simply easier for some people to control their emotions than others, and this has little or nothing to do with any form of intelligence.
Fear of Flying Example
Most of the people that I have spoken too who don’t have a fear of flying believe this is because they have high emotional intelligence. They also like to think that it’s because they are being rational and logical. This is simply an interpretation which conveniently gratifies their ego. In reality, they likely have naturally low emotional sensitivity which has nothing to do with intelligence or rationality.
In fact, there is research that suggests that more intelligent people have a tendency to overthink situations resulting in more difficulty controlling or regulating their emotions.
Personality Theory MBTI
People that are the most logical and rational are so because of a lack of emotion for the majority of the time. Emotion is the enemy of logic and rationality. Because these people lack emotion for the majority of the time, when they encounter a difficult or stressful situation, their emotions may kick into overdrive. This may partly be because they don’t have as much experience with dealing with emotions.
This could simply be because of a difference in their priorities determined by their personality, or because they have problems with regulating their emotions.
Someone that appears to have good emotional control aka high emotional intelligence, may simply have low emotional reactivity. This would likely correlate with being low on the trait of neuroticism. There is a skill aspect to this. However, that would be called social skills, not social intelligence.