You're sharp as a pin, but how high's your EQ?

The importance of intellect is being challenged by experts who say emotional ability is as vital as brain power.

"W e should take care not to make the intellect our god," warned Albert Einstein. "It has, of course, powerful muscles but no personality." It is a warning that psychologists and scientists have almost totally ignored. We have IQ tests, plus all the controversy that surrounds them, but emotions and matters of the heart are still seen as largely the preserve of artists and therapists. A recent publication on the mind and the brain from Scientific American contained not one reference to emotions.

The intellect, however, may soon be gaining an emotional dimension. A new book, Emotional Intelligence by Dr Daniel Goleman, just published in the United States, suggests that in the near future the performance of schoolchildren in tests of emotional maturity may be considered even more important than their performance in IQ tests, while in business, social competence may be a better predictor of corporate success than technical ability.

The split between reason and emotion is reflected in the way we speak. We talk about "keeping a cool head" and "being rational", as if emotions were an embarrassing distraction from making a sensible decision. Part of Dr Goleman's book is based on fascinating research with brain-damaged patients which suggests that this idea we have about emotions is profoundly wrong.

Professor Antonio Damasio, of the University of Iowa college of medicine, has been working with brain-damaged patients who have lost the links to the emotional parts of their brains. There is nothing wrong with their intellects, many achieve high scores on IQ tests, but when asked to choose, for example, between two dates for their next appointment something remarkable happens.

This is how Damasio describes it in his book Descartes' Error: "The patient pulled out his appointment book and began consulting his calendar. For the better part of half an hour [he] enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything one could reasonably think about concerning a simple date." Trying to make decisions based on pure reason - without the weighting that emotion gives - turns out to be not beneficial but practically impossible.

When these patients do make personal or social decisions, such as choosing friends or where to invest money, they are frequently disastrous. In one study, Damasio ran a series of tests comparing the way these patients and normal volunteers responded with card games involving high or low risks.

While the normal volunteers quickly learnt to avoid the risky cards and showed signs of anxiety when faced with one, the patients showed no such signs and never learnt. "The implication," says Damasio, "is that while normal people use logic to analyse risks before making decisions, their brains also give them an automatic emotional warning signal that the patients' brains fail to produce."

The phrase "emotional intelligence" was first coined five years ago by the Yale psychologist Peter Salovey to describe qualities such as understanding your own feelings, having empathy with others and being able to control your impulses. In the wake of Goleman's book, people with these abilities might be said to have a high EQ. How valuable just one of these abilities - impulse control - can be is illustrated by a study which showed that marshmallows can be used to predict the later success of a child at nursery school.

Four-year-olds were each given a marshmallow by the experimenter and told that if they didn't eat it while he was out of the room he would give them another one when he came back. Tests on the same children several years later revealed that the ones who held out had grown to be better adjusted, more popular and more confident, while those who couldn't wait were more likely to be lonely and easily frustrated.

Another element of emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of other people's emotional states. Because this is such a natural ability for most of us we don't realise how complex it is. But, again, an insight into what is going on comes from Professor Damasio's brain-damaged patients. One of these was a woman with normal intelligence and good emotional health but a history of badly misjudging others' intentions and making poor social decisions. Brain scans revealed the nearly total loss of her amygdala - one of the parts of the brain that plays a key role in producing emotions - but the preservation of other structures. When shown photographs of faces displaying various emotions, she had difficulty distinguishing between them: she did not, for instance, rate surprised and happy faces as more alike than sad and happy faces.

Navigating her social world without the aid of such an emotional cue that the rest of us take for granted became very difficult. The reason is that humans are intensely social animals. We have been shaped by evolution to connect with other people and to be sensitive to their feelings. It is a process that is hard-wired into babies' brains. Within a few hours of birth their gaze will stop for longer on a human face than anything else and within a few months they are smiling, pointing and embarking on a detailed programme of social interaction. Children who lack this ability are described as autistic.

Ideally, it is early practice that equips us with social skills such as empathy, graciousness and the ability to read a social situation. Just as with languages, some people are better at these skills than others. The Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal has developed a test to determine how good people are at reading emotional cues and - as with impulse control - he has found that those with high scores tend to have more success at work and in relationships.

Business has been quick to pick up on this new emphasis on emotional ability, unsurprisingly perhaps, as it moves increasingly away from hierarchical, authoritarian systems of management to ones that emphasise discussion and co-operation. The American insurance company Metropolitan Life, for example, realised it was hiring 5,000 people a year to sell life insurance, spending $30,000 apiece to train them and then losing 50 per cent of them within a year because it is such a depressing job.

Martin Seligman, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, identified the crucial emotional element in the makeup of those who stayed and prospered as optimism. While those who gave up were likely to say to themselves after a hard day, "I never get a chance to relax," the successful ones would define it as a short-term problem and say something like, "I was exceptionally busy this week." Hiring those who showed up as optimists on a questionnaire cut costs and boosted performance.

Of course, the appropriate emotion may not always be optimism. Dr Robert Briner, who works at the department of organisational psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London, illustrates yet another way emotions can affect the way we think. He points out that in certain situations the upbeat, "have a nice day" approach is not what is needed. "We have found that people who are slightly depressed tend to have a more realistic appraisal of themselves and the situation," he says. "If you want a careful reading of your proposal give it to someone when they are feeling down."

What all this adds up to is what researchers call metamood - the ability to recognise our emotions and so have a better chance of handling them in a creative and productive way. This is one of the crucial differences between the idea of emotional intelligence and normal intelligence. There is a sense with IQ tests that you're stuck with what you've got, whereas at the heart of emotional intelligence is the idea that it is possible to change.

Take moods. Most of us are not very good at dealing with a bad mood although there is no shortage of advice: "Just snap out of it. Have a good cry. Talk to a friend, a problem shared is a problem halved." Robert Thayer, professor of psychology at California State University, recently completed the first large-scale study of which methods actually work and which don't and came up with some surprising conclusions. According to his research, male techniques for dealing with bad moods, such as shrugging off the problem and going for a walk, are actually more effective than those of women, contrary to popular opinion. Not only that, but time-honoured female techniques of pouring it all out to a friend or having a good cry are a waste of time. Learning how to control our moods in these ways is another prospect that flows from the recognition of emotional intelligence.

The IQ test - principally used in business as a means of assessing potential and still in wider use in the US - has been subject to misuse as a tool with which to make racial distinctions. There are those who worry that measures of emotional intelligence might be open to similar misuse. Professor Jerome Kagan of Harvard University balks at the idea of an EQ - Emotional Quotient. "You can't assign numerical values to emotional issues," he says.

But, more optimistically, an assessment of emotional intelligence could mean that we become better at identifying the qualities that lead to success - of which IQ only accounts for about 20 per cent - and judge people in a more rounded way.

None of this is really new. As Montesquieu remarked, aristocratically: "A really intelligent man feels what other men only know."