Neurological foundations of EIDate of publication: 08/07/2007 This section is still being developed but will eventually contain complete summaries of studies that have examined the neurological foundations of emotional-social intelligence based on the Bar-On model. In the meantime, I have summarized the key studies that I am aware of. Should you wish to share findings from a study that you have conducted or have detailed information on studies that others have conducted focusing on this topic, please use the template provided above for summarizing this study and email it to us (info@reuvenbaron.org). You are invited to provide results that confirm or refute these findings and help us understand this area better. Together with my colleagues [Bar-On et al., 2003], we conduct a study to test the hypotheses that emotional intelligence is different from cognitive intelligence and that damage to neural structures that govern emotions and feelings, but not neural structures that are directly associated with cognitive intelligence, are expected to lead to low scores on measures of emotional intelligence, personal judgment in decision-making and social functioning but not on measures of cognitive intelligence. In this study, the experimental group consisted of patients with focal brain lesions in areas known to be critical for the processing of emotions and feelings (the right amygdala, right insular / somatosensory cortex, orbitofrontal / ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex); and the control group consisted of patients with similar size lesions outside those areas known to be critical for emotions and feelings. The experimental and control groups, 13 and 12 patients respectively, were matched with respect to gender, age and level of education. We used three types of measures in examining these patients: (1) the Bar-On EQ-i for assessing emotional intelligence; (2) standardized neuropsychological tests for assessing cognitive intelligence, perception, memory and executive functioning; (3) the “Iowa Gambling Task” for assessing the ability to exercise personal judgment in decision-making [Bechara et al., 1994; Bechara et al., 1997a; Bechara et al., 1997b; Bechara et al., 1999; Bechara, Tranel & Damasio, 2000]; and (4) semi-structured interviews for assessing social functioning [Tranel et al., 2002]. Non-parametric statistics were applied to examine the results because of the small sample sizes involved.
In addition to a lack of significant difference between the experimental and control groups regarding the level of cognitive intelligence, no significant correlation was found between cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence for the clinical sample examined. In striking contrast to their unimpaired cognitive intelligence, post-morbid emotional and social functioning was found to be significantly worse for the experimental group when compared with the control group. Most important, the experimental group subjects exhibited significantly lower emotional intelligence than those in the control group. Additionally, it was interesting to discover that the findings demonstrate that emotional intelligence is significantly related to the ability to exercise personal judgment in decision-making. Moreover, it was also revealed that the experimental group’s personal judgment got worse rather than better as time went on (i.e., they were making more and more disadvantageous decisions).
The findings from the lesion studies summarized here are supported by functional neuroimagining studies that have identified activity related to key aspects of emotional intelligence such as emotional self-awareness in the same area of the orbitofrontal / ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex [Lane, 2000; Lane & McRae, 2004]. While this confluence of findings indicates that the orbitofrontal area of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex governs key aspects emotional intelligence, the site of major activity associated with cognitive intelligence appears to be situated primarily in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [Duncan, 2001]. Not only are the neural circuitries that govern emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence situated in different areas of the brain, there also is a low degree of correlation between these two types of intelligence as has been demonstrated here and elsewhere [Van Rooy & Viswesvaran, 2004; Van Rooy, Pluta & Viswesvaran, in press]. Both sources of evidence, neurological and statistical, indicate that emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence represent different types of intelligence.
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