Emotional Intelligence: A Personal Narrative Analysis

Sitting in my living room, I was overcome with pain and anxiety. I had just returned home from the hospital after having knee surgery. This surgery was going to take three or four months to recover and it could not have come at a worse point in my life. The summer going into senior year of high school was the “now or never” time for getting recruited for college baseball, and I was injured. I could not stop thinking that my future was ruined and that I would never be able to play baseball again. I came very close to making the rash decision to quit baseball right then, instead I focused on my rehab and came back stronger my senior year. This was what my general intelligence told me, however, my emotional intelligence almost caused me to

give up on a dream that I had been working towards since I was eight years old. Luckily, I did not succumb to these emotions. I focused on my rehab and returned to the field sooner than expected and had a great final year of high school baseball. Many people, however, do succumb to their emotions when making a decision. Unfortunately, in today’s world there are so many people that are not in touch with their emotions and do not understand how to control their emotions. This is referred to as being emotionally illiterate. Thus, when the emotions of an emotionally illiterate person enter into or even control their decision-making, it often results in a less than optimal decision. The fact is, though, that emotions do play a huge role in decisions that are made. This is why emotional intelligence is equally, if not more important, than general intelligence in the process of decision making.
The brain works in very interesting ways; ways that often defy explanation.

In Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence,” he dives into the science behind the brain and how emotions can affect a person’s decision making process. The human brain consists of two main parts: the neocortex, or the thinking brain, and the amygdala, the emotional brain. The neocortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for rational thoughts. “It contains the centers that put together and comprehend what the senses perceive” (Goleman 11). Contrasting the neocortex is the amygdala, which “acts as a storehouse of emotional memory; life without the amygdala is a life stripped of personal meanings” (Goleman 15). According to Goleman, one man, whose amygdala was surgically removed, became completely uninterested in people, preferring to sit in isolation with no human contact. “Without an amygdala he seemed to have lost all recognition of feeling, as well as any feeling about feelings” (Goleman 15). The amygdala has its own circuitry attaching it to the pre-frontal cortex, which is the center for the brain for working memory. If this circuitry was cut, a person’s decision making process would be greatly affected. However, if this connection was broken, a person’s score on an IQ test would not be affected at all. This is true because the emotional aspect of the brain, which is used in making decisions, would be affected but the rational thinking portion would not be affected. The amygdala

is often difficult to understand but thanks to new research, we are better understanding its functions.
Joseph Ledoux, a neuroscientist at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, made a discovery that changed the way we see the role of the amygdala.

His discovery was that the branching in the brain allows the amygdala to begin to respond in stressful situations before the neocortex begins its response. Oftentimes, people make decisions out of anger or fear. They later regret these decisions, once they have put some rational thought into it. This is called neural hijacking which can now be explained thanks to Ledoux. I almost fell victim to neural hijacking when I was faced with the decision to either quit baseball or stick it out. More examples of the consequences of not having control of our emotions are vast. This emotional illiteracy, according to some teachers is due to “schools caring more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they’ll be alive next week” (Goleman 231). The following are results of this emotional illiteracy. First is the increase in issues among teenagers. According to Goleman, in the 1990s, teen arrests for violent crimes reached a record high, teen arrests for rape doubled, teen murder rates quadrupled, the suicide rate for teens tripled, and the teen pregnancy rate continued to climb. Second is mental illnesses, which are a huge byproduct of not being in touch with emotions. Symptoms of depression and different forms of eating disorders have skyrocketed in teens, especially girls. Third is that children of

today’s generation have less likelihood of being a part of a stable marriage. With the divorce rates continuing to rise; “it is predicted that two out of three marriages of young people end in divorce” (Goleman 232). This is important because neural hijacking can be directly related to the skyrocket in divorce rates, as many young people impulsively jump into marriages that they later regret. It is crucial that people are exposed to strategies for dealing with their emotions at a young age in order to prevent these consequences as they grow up.