A guide to emotional intelligence in the lab

When Chen looks back on her time as a PhD student a decade ago, there’s one skill that she wishes she had developed much more than any technical prowess: emotional intelligence. This often-overlooked ability to recognize and manage the emotions of yourself and others might have saved her from years of inner turmoil.

During her PhD, Chen’s supervisor went from paying her little attention to taking a romantic interest in her. The relationship escalated into a toxic but exhilarating affair. “I believed everything he said,” says Chen, who requested a pseudonym for this article to avoid career repercussions. But things fell apart after her postdoctoral studies, when she asked her supervisor to clarify their relationship status so she could make decisions about her own life. The now-former supervisor’s reaction surprised her: “He stopped all communication with me.”

The end of the relationship also had professional consequences. The supervisor reassigned several of Chen’s projects to other students without discussing it with her, she says. When the results of these projects were published as papers and patents, Chen says, she was not included as a co-author or an inventor, despite her contributions. If she had been recognized and acknowledged for her work, Chen thinks, she would be in a “substantially stronger position professionally than I am today” — a familiar bind for anyone who’s had to explain a publication gap left by a hostile manager.

The sudden cut-off left Chen confused and heartbroken, affecting her work and her productivity. As she reflects, Chen realizes that her supervisor’s actions were deeply unprofessional and took advantage of her position as a student — the kind of unchecked power dynamic explored in The Open Secret: a piece on academic bullying. However, she adds that having greater emotional intelligence — sometimes known as emotional quotient, or EQ — could have helped her to avoid falling for her supervisor’s false promises or to navigate her heartbreak more effectively during the aftermath.

Emotional intelligence is a catch-all term for the mix of self-awareness, empathy, social skills and management of feelings that comprises our ability to understand others. It has a reputation for being overlooked as a tool in academia in favour of technical expertise and outward achievement. But it’s key for career success, because it enables people to work effectively with others, says Marc Brackett, a psychologist at Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s therefore a skill that complements many other capabilities. “It helps you deal with all of the barriers to achieving your goals in life,” he adds.

Some universities, including Yale and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, run courses on emotional intelligence. Brackett’s centre aims to help staff to manage difficult emotions and create a supportive learning environment, whereas Harvard’s course focuses on emotional intelligence in leadership roles. But few institutions provide such training specifically for PhD students, laboratory leaders and other academic staff.

There’s still debate about what emotional intelligence is, how to measure it and its role in the workplace, says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organizational psychologist at University College London. And although emotional intelligence has become prized in many fields, its importance might depend on the job in question: it’s probably more important for those who work regularly with others than for those who mostly work alone. “What’s missing about the debate, because of the popularity of the concept, is a little bit of nuance,” says Chamorro-Premuzic.

Heal thyself

Emotional intelligence as a concept was formally introduced by Yale psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer almost four decades ago. They described it as a set of skills that enable people to recognize their own and other people’s emotions and use this information to guide their thinking and behaviour. Five years after Salovey and Mayer coined the term, psychologist and New York Times journalist Daniel Goleman popularized the idea and expanded the definition to include social skills, such as empathy and conflict resolution.

Since then, the idea of emotional intelligence has become a messy mixed bag of models, definitions and methods, says Chamorro-Premuzic. The American Psychological Association in Washington DC defines emotional intelligence as the “ability to process emotional information and use it in reasoning and other cognitive activities”.

According to Chamorro-Premuzic, much of the disagreement about what emotional intelligence is has centred around whether it’s truly a skill or simply “personality rebranded”. Some models define emotional intelligence as a set of cognitive skills that can be picked up by anyone, whereas others approach it more as a fundamentally innate trait. Still others present it as a combination of the two.

Some researchers are taking the definition a step further. Camila Devis-Rozental, a learning-design researcher at Bournemouth University, UK, who focuses on well-being in higher education, coined the term ‘socio-emotional intelligence’, which includes ‘social responsibility’ — a moral compass that guides people towards making a positive impact on those around them.

Despite the varied definitions, emotional intelligence has become a “darling of the human-resources world”, says Chamorro-Premuzic. Several studies support its glowing status as an essential skill in the workplace: people with high emotional intelligence experience greater career success, more job satisfaction and are more innovative than their less emotionally intelligent colleagues. Research also suggests that emotional intelligence is an important ingredient for effective leadership and helps to build strong relationships.

But higher emotional intelligence doesn’t always lead to better outcomes across the board, says Chamorro-Premuzic. For instance, although some research suggests that emotional intelligence is related to creativity, other evidence hints that traits often linked to emotional intelligence, such as agreeableness and conscientiousness, are negatively correlated with it. People with high emotional intelligence might also be reluctant to challenge the status quo or make bold choices, he adds.

The thinking goes that such people tend to be respectful and focused on getting along with others rather than shaking things up, he explains. Furthermore, workplaces that place too much value on emotional intelligence can end up sidelining talented, high-performing people who might be neurotic, grumpy or lack social skills, he adds.

At the darker end of the scale, having high emotional intelligence can also enable people to be overly persuasive and manipulative. Such people are often skilled at masking their intentions with charisma, which can be misinterpreted as being emotionally intelligent and socially adept, says Chamorro-Premuzic. “It can be co-opted or utilized by people who are very toxic,” he says.

The emotionally intelligent lab

Misconceptions around EQ are rife, especially those who say it’s either all about being charming or all about making nice, polite gestures, such as opening the door for someone, says Margaret Andrews, a former academic who runs emotional-intelligence training for business leaders at Harvard. To Andrews, it’s not about suppressing your emotions or avoiding potential conflict. If anything, emotional intelligence equips people to have difficult conversations in a way that the other person can understand, such as sharing challenging feedback, she says. “It’s actually often being able to see what needs to be said.” (See ‘Tips for boosting your emotional intelligence’.)

The ability to deliver challenging feedback or tackle conflicts without adding fuel to the fire is important for effective leadership, says Andrews. Despite this, many senior academics and scientific and technical professionals are unprepared when they reach a leadership position, because it requires a whole different skill set that is more people-focused than technical, she adds. “A lot of the time, people in higher education will consider themselves to be accidental leaders.”

Andrews also says that it’s not uncommon for researchers to dismiss emotional intelligence as a low-priority ‘soft skill’, because they are often too busy developing their technical expertise. But although emotional intelligence is just one of many ingredients for a successful team manager, plenty of research has found that it’s strongly linked with effective leadership — a distinction that maps closely onto the difference between supervision and mentorship. Many people rate interpersonal skills as the top quality of their favourite boss, she adds.

Few studies have investigated emotional intelligence in PhD students and its impact on their work, but it’s probably a skill that can help graduate students to develop the resilience to cope with common hurdles, including receiving difficult feedback and working mainly alone, says Devis-Rozental. And, like any skill, it’s learnt. “It’s not something you’re just born with, but actually something you can develop depending on your environment,” she says.

Ultimately, creating an emotionally intelligent culture is all about remembering that researchers are people, says Nemanja Stanojević, a physician at Roskilde University, Denmark. “We are pushed to produce and to be efficient,” he says. “In that marathon, we forget that we are just human beings.”

Tips for boosting your emotional intelligence

Feel your feelings

The first step to developing emotional intelligence is to become more aware of your emotions, says Marc Brackett, a psychologist at Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence in New Haven, Connecticut. That means giving yourself — and everyone else — permission to experience feelings fully instead of casting them aside or suppressing them. “Unpleasant emotions don’t feel good in the moment, but they’re useful for many things,” he says.

Tune your self-awareness

Emotions are rarely black and white, but rather complex and multifaceted. Emotional intelligence involves developing the self-awareness to recognize the many shades of emotion in yourself and others. For instance, instead of simply feeling happy, you might be closer to content or pleased. “It’s labelling emotions precisely and in a granular way,” says Brackett.

Build your emotional vocabulary

Do you often say ‘meh’ to describe how you’re feeling? It might be time to expand your emotional vocabulary. There are several tools that can help you to identify and track your moods. In 2019, Brackett and his colleagues launched an app called How We Feel, which includes a ‘mood meter’ with 144 words.

Learn to regulate your emotions

Building the ability to control your emotions is key to responding to difficult challenges rather than reacting to them. There are several strategies for managing your emotions, including mindfulness and cognitive behavioural techniques, such as replacing unhelpful thoughts with positive ones. It’s a good idea to learn several strategies so you can self-regulate in a range of emotional contexts and situations, says Brackett.

Write it down

One step to building emotional intelligence is keeping a journal to track your feelings and reflect on situations, says Rory Lambe, a wearable-technology researcher at University College Dublin. He adds that writing things down regularly is a good way to practise your emotional skills and keep them sharp. “It built my emotional intelligence and allowed me to respond in a better way,” says Lambe.

Listen between the lines

When it comes to building better relationships with other people, listening a little more deeply can go a long way, says Nemanja Stanojević, a physician at Roskilde University, Denmark. “Sometimes it’s not what they say, it’s more about how they say it,” he says. For instance, Stanojević’s medical training taught him that if someone takes a long time to explain something, it often means that they are struggling. Now, he uses similar techniques in his academic life.