Emotional Intelligence: Daniel Goldman's Book Review

Emotional Intelligence is a very psychological book, focused on the human brain that. I have started to read hoping that I will be learning more about humans as a species and about the way we function on daily basis.

The main topics of the book were the way we perceive the world around us, the way human emotions work and why some people are more likely to overcome others on the intellectual side.

The writing style was especially interesting because of the way the author divides all the information in 16 chapters and 5 parts. It was all very straight forward, the information being filtered to be useful at all times.

In the first part, Daniel Goldman introduces us to the human emotions and explains how the cortex and the limbic system are intercorelated. The cortex in considered to be the rational side of the human brain and the limbic system is considered to represent the part of the brain correlated to the emotions. In this part, he also explains that emotional intelligence can be learned in time.

The second part contains six chapters and approaches multiple subjects. One of those subjects is strengthened by certified studies in which they observed that most of the high IQ scoring students are doing worse in their practical lives than most of the average IQ scoring students, proving that the IQ does not determine someone’s emotional intelligence level.

Another topic that was discussed in this part is the emotional disease. There are two kinds of emotional diseases, the ones that require pharmaceutical aid and the ones that are masked by the brain, when the patient never feels the need for such thing. The author believes that an untreated emotional disease could ruin your chance to success as an individual if left untreated.

Another interesting thing that is discussed in this part is the emotional intelligence gender distributions. He considers that women have emotions such as empathy and compassion more developed than men.

The third part focuses it s attention on the emotion in correlation with marital life and the correlation between health and emotions. Some aspects that stuck to my mind were that women tend to express their emotions much more often and much easier than men and that long exposure to sadness or anxiety is correlated to health diseases.

The forth part is focused on a certified study that demonstrated that children subjected to frequently beating will react the same way when they are in distress and that they gradually lose their empathy. Another important thing would be that when you experience trauma or frequent stress you are more likely to end up with biological problems.

In the fifth part, the author explains us that some people can not differentiate the anger to the sadness. Those people tend to overeat and gain weight. He also explains us that people that feel lonely or have a low number of friends are at significant risk of medical disease and early death. The conclusion to the book is that emotional intelligence could be taught. He recommends everybody training programs to educate e.i.

As for what I have learnt and the application of knowledge in practical, I feel like I found out lots of interesting facts about our minds and how we tend to react to different situations. I can not say that I will be voluntarily try to change the way I see things, but I really think this book left it s stain on my mind.

In my opinion, reading this book could benefit anyone that has interest into the psychological part of the human race and that wants to know more about emotions and emotional intelligence. The clear structure of the writing is also a plus for this book, the only hard to digest aspect of it being the more pretentious language.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this book and the fact that it fulfilled all my initial expectations and I will be trying to read more psychology oriented books from now on as they seem to be thought provoking.