Friday 8 March 2013

Further investigations

From feeling inspired and intrigued by the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI), and from the responses, so far, to my 'testing-the-water' questionnaire, I am still feeling very positive about trying to base my inquiry on whether there is any correlation between dance education and developing EI skills.
However, one of my main concerns has been 'does personality have a lot to do with Emotional Intelligence?'. For example, if I rate highly on areas such as openness and extraversion, and low on neuroticism - dimensions of the Big Five personality traits - am I already more Emotionally Intelligent as an individual than somebody with different personality traits, with or without the dance training?

Reading around the subject a little further I came across the following statement,
"Your personality is a result of your preferences, such as your inclination to introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can't be used to predict emotional intelligence... People often assume that certain traits (for example, extroversion) are associated with a higher EQ, but those who prefer to be with other people are no more emotionally intelligent than people who prefer to be alone. You can use your personality to assist in developing your EQ, but the latter isn't dependent on the former."
                                                                (Bradberry and Greaves, 2009, p.18)
 
If this is the case, which I hope further reading will help confirm or negate, then I feel that any inquiry I might undertake is more likely to stand alone in its validity as researching EI development in dance, rather than being muddied by the possible influence of personality.


References
Bradberry, T., & Greaves, J. (2009). Emotional Intelligence 2.0. TalentSmart.

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