How old is eq

Empathy helps us care about others and build good friendships and relationships. It guides us on what to say and how to behave around someone who is feeling strong emotions. We all get angry. We all have disappointments. Often it's important to express how you feel. But managing your reaction means knowing when , where , and how to express yourself.

When you understand your emotions and know how to manage them, you can use self-control to hold a reaction if now is not the right time or place to express it. Someone who has good EQ knows it can damage relationships to react to emotions in a way that's disrespectful, too intense, too impulsive, or harmful.

Part of managing emotions is choosing our moods. Moods are emotional states that last a bit. We have the power to decide what mood is right for a situation, and then to get into that mood.

Choosing the right mood can help someone get motivated, concentrate on a task, or try again instead of giving up. People with good EQ know that moods aren't just things that happen to us. We can control them by knowing which mood is best for a particular situation and how to get into that mood.

Emotional intelligence is something that develops as we get older. If it didn't, all adults would act like little kids, expressing their emotions physically through stomping, crying, hitting, yelling, and losing control!

Some of the skills that make up emotional intelligence develop earlier. They may seem easier: For example, recognizing emotions seems easy once we know what to pay attention to. But the EQ skill of managing emotional reactions and choosing a mood might seem harder to master.

Goleman, one of the first people to raise awareness of EQ, is the author of Emotional Intelligence , a groundbreaking book that came out in A traditional IQ test assesses cognitive abilities through vocabulary, reading comprehension and retention, reasoning and math skills. Meanwhile, EQ assessments test different aspects of emotional intelligence: emotional literacy, empathy, intrinsic motivation and how we navigate emotions.

Schools with more progressive approaches to social-emotional learning are starting to assess EQ in students to get a baseline, much like they test math or reading in September to get a sense of where kids are at. Some school counsellors may suggest an EQ test for a child who is struggling socially, to determine which skills to work on. Just like with IQ scores, an EQ score of is considered average; is awesome, but 85 indicates there are some challenges.

Emotional intelligence quotient scores are in decline all over the world, according to the State of the Heart report, an annual scorecard by Six Seconds, the Emotional Intelligence Network, a non-profit whose mission is to foster and raise awareness of EQ through research and education.

It tracks emotional intelligence levels among , people in countries using online tests. Another culprit is our growing reliance on technology and social media for communication. In my family, our daughter, Avery, 12, has come to the defence of a boy who has a learning disability by standing up to a group of kids who were taunting him in the schoolyard.

It has forced her, on many occasions, to decipher his feelings based on behavioural rather than verbal cues. The emotionally intelligent child is also one who can label her own emotions accurately, regulate them and control reactions to them; for example, she can verbalize her anger or frustration and think of ways to defuse her feelings rather than throw a book against the wall.

A child with a high EQ can also handle more complex social situations and build meaningful friendships, in part because of that ability to relate to or empathize with peers. As a kid grows into a teen and then an adult, EQ becomes tied to internal motivation and self-regulation. It governs how she makes decisions or harnesses her thoughts and feelings to cope with stress, solve problems and pursue goals. For example, well-developed EQ is personified in the student who can manage her time to complete homework assignments , study for tests, hold down a part-time job and apply to university, all while successfully juggling multiple family and peer relationships.

At the same time, I worry about my son, whose emotional intelligence is still in its infancy. The good news? Unlike IQ, which is static, EQ can increase. To determine the peak age for EQ, Levenson's team had study participants who ranged in age from their 20s to their 60s watch a series of video clips designed to elicit different emotions, like disgust and sadness.

These volunteers were asked to manipulate their emotions in response to the nasty or heartrending clips -- either to remain unmoved or to try to see the upside of whatever they witnessed on screen. Which age group was best able to reinterpret and re-contextualize the images? You guessed it -- not the more emotionally volatile somethings. In fact, the researchers found that the older the participant, the better he or she tended to be at putting the videos in perspective.

Younger and middle-aged participants, meanwhile, were better at simply ignoring their emotions. While being more affected by sad or gross scenes might not sound like a particularly useful trait, Levenson argues the tendency to experience and actively process -- rather than ignore -- emotions offers older adults real advantages.

In some ways these findings are surprising. Many people fear they're stuck with the level of IQ or EQ they have when they're born, and older folks are sometimes saddled with crotchety, cane-waving, "Get off my lawn, you young-uns!