5 Signs Of High Emotional Intelligence

You probably need high emotional intelligence to recover from your stroke. What is your doctors plan to cultivate that in you? 

5 Signs Of High Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is linked to success in many areas of life.

People with high emotional intelligence are more successful at work and across many areas of life, research finds.
There are five signs of emotional intelligence, according to one model developed by Daniel Goleman:

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1. Self-awareness: knowing your own strengths and weakness, as well as drives and values.
2. Self-regulation: being able to control disruptive emotions and adapt to new circumstances.
3. Social skill: capable of managing relationships with other people effectively.
4. Empathy: taking into account other people’s feelings when making decisions.
5. Motivation: a drive to succeed.

Those high in emotional intelligence are aware of their emotions and good at controlling and expressing them.
They can read emotions in others well and know how to manage them to achieve desired goals.
Higher emotional intelligence leads to better relationships with others, higher psychological well-being, greater self-compassion and a more positive perception by others.
The conclusion comes from a ‘meta-analysis’ — a type of study that collects together the results of other studies.
The results showed that emotional intelligence predicted workplace performance over and above personality and IQ.

The authors write that other studies have found that emotional intelligence is…

…a predictor in important domains such as academic performance, job performance, negotiation, leadership, emotional labor, trust, work–family conflict, and stress…”

Daniel Goleman’s model is just one way of thinking about emotional intelligence.
The researchers found, though, that different models and measures all provided insights into people’s emotional intelligence.
Professor Neal Ashkanasy, who was not involved in the research, said:

“By analyzing the numerous studies of emotional intelligence that have been conducted over the last decade, the authors of this article provide an evidence-based account of emotional intelligence, where it works and where it doesn’t.
And, most importantly, which of the various versions of emotional intelligence work the best.
This will prove to be a valuable tool for academic researchers, as well as business consultants and managers.”

The study was published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (O’Boyle et al., 2010).

Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self

You are going to need one hell of a lot of self-control to be able to handle the extremely long and unknown ways to recover from your stroke. There are no short cuts, miracles or magic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/self-control-is-just-empathy-with-a-future-you/509726/

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.
This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.
Press your right index finger to the top of your right ear, where it meets your head. Now move up an inch and back an inch. You’re now pointing at your right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). This area has long been linked to empathy and selflessness. But Soutschek, by using magnetic fields to briefly shut down the rTPJ, has shown that it’s also involved in self-control.

Which makes perfect sense. Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self—a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. So think of self-control as a kind of temporal selflessness. It’s Present You taking a hit to help out Future You.
“For a long time, people have speculated that we use the same mechanisms to reason about other people as about our hypothetical selves,” says Rebecca Saxe from MIT. “So this new study fits really well.”
Saxe should know. She was one of the first scientists to link the rTPJ to theory of mind—the ability to understand the mental states of other people. In 2005, she and Nancy Kanwisher scanned people’s brains while they listened to stories in which protagonists made poor choices based on false beliefs. This experiment showed that the TPJ is active specifically when people are “reasoning about the contents of another person’s minds”—the essence of theory of mind. This region, the duo wrote, helps people to think about thinking people.
At the same time, many other neuroscientists were doing similar experiments and getting the same answers. The consensus was striking, Saxe later wrote. “Because there was almost no pre-existing neuroscience of theory of mind, researchers came to the topic with unusually few preconceptions about where to look in the brain. In those circumstances, neuroimaging is notoriously fickle, producing many false positives and false negatives. Yet every group that sought to identify brain regions implicated in ToM got essentially the same answer; and in study after study, we still do.”

Many other studies have since expanded on those early results. If the rTPJ is bigger, people are more likely to behave altruistically. If the neurons within it are better-connected (and well-linked to other parts of the brain), people show less bias towards their own in-groups. If the area is stimulated by electric currents, people become better at taking someone else’s perspective.
And if the region is disrupted, it changes our ability to reason about morality. Consider a woman who poisons her friend’s coffee—if she does so deliberately, we’d judge her more harshly than if she acted accidentally. Intent matters, and we need the rTPJ to judge intent. When Liane Young, one of Saxe’s former students, disrupted the rTPJ using magnetic fields, she found that people were more lenient towards the deliberate poisoner, as long as her friend survived. With their ability to gauge intent disrupted, they started looking to outcomes instead.
Not everything fits with the idea of the rTPJ as a nexus for theory of mind. For example, many studies suggest that it affects our ability to shift our attention from one part of space to another, like a technician moving a spotlight around. “Even in my own small lab, people disagree about the function of the rTPJ,” says Young, now a professor at Boston College.
If you look at the debate and relax your eyes, you can probably merge the two viewpoints into one. Maybe the rTPJ is a region that redirects our attention from one thing to another—whether between objects in the world around us, or between our minds and other people’s. Alternatively, it’s likely that what we call the rTPJ is not actually a singular bit of the brain. “There’s a lot of work suggesting that there are different sub-regions—one of which does spatial reorienting, and the other does perspective-taking,” says Young.

That’s where Soutschek’s study comes in. He specifically focused on the back half of the rTPJ—the one that’s been more heavily linked to empathy—and disrupted it in 43 volunteers. When that happened, the recruits became more likely to pocket a pile of cash for themselves rather than splitting it with a partner, and especially when the partner was a stranger. But they were also more likely to pick a small immediate lump of cash over a larger future one, especially when the delays were long.
A second experiment explained why. This time, the volunteers saw a picture of a man standing in a room with red discs on the wall. The volunteers could see all the discs, but they had to say how many the man in the room could see. They had to shift their perspective to his, and they became worse at that when their rTPJ was disrupted. What’s more, Soutschek showed that the extent of their bias—their inability to leave their own heads—predicted both how impulsive and how selfish they were in the earlier experiment.
This tells us that impulsivity and selfishness are just two halves of the same coin, as are their opposites restraint and empathy. Perhaps this is why people who show dark traits like psychopathy and sadism score low on empathy but high on impulsivity. Perhaps it’s why impulsivity correlates with slips among recovering addicts, while empathy correlates with longer bouts of abstinence. These qualities represent our successes and failures at escaping our own egocentric bubbles, and understanding the lives of others—even when those others wear our own older faces.

The music you like says a lot about how your brain processes information

So when your doctor doesn't have any music prescribed for your stroke rehab they don't have to worry about the proper type of music for how you process information.
Why you should be listening to music here:
  Music protocols. This is a complete no-brainer, your doctor is completely incompetent if this hasn't already been implemented in their hospital.

      1.  Exploring a Neuroplasticity Model of Music Therapy

      2.  Revealed: The Type of Music That Makes You Feel Most Powerful

       3. 11 Problems Music Can Solve

       4. How playing an instrument benefits your brain - Anita Collins

        5. Why does music therapy work? The Science Behind the Music.

        6. Musical Training Can Increase Blood Flow in Brain

        7.  Listening to classical music ameliorates unilateral neglect after stroke

         8. Music brings memories back to the brain injured 

         9.  Plasticity in the sensorimotor cortex induced by Music-supported therapy in stroke patients: a TMS study

          10.  Moderating variables of music training-induced neuroplasticity: a review and discussion

           11. Hand-Clapping Songs Improve Motor and Cognitive Skills, Research Shows

The music you like compared to the way you process information:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/music-says-lot-brain-processes-194238794.html 

Confession: I've recently started getting into country music — a genre of music that used to make me want to change the radio station as fast as possible.

But as uncharacteristic as it is for me to delve into that genre, it makes sense for the way I react to the world around me, according to a recent study published in PLOS ONE.

In the study, researchers found that the types of music you like are linked to the way you process information.

The study was based off the idea that there are two ways people respond to their surroundings:

The first way is called empathizing, where someone is socially apt and can easily interact with those around them. The second way, called systemizing, describes a less sociable way of interaction where the individual interacts with others based on a pre-set notion of how they think they should act.

For example, when asked by a friend if their new hair cut looks good, a systemizer would tell the truth without considering their friend's feelings while an empathyzer would fudge the truth and saw what they thought would make their friend feel good. This type of systemizing is more common in men than women, according to a 2005 study.

In fact, this hypothetical haircut situation is one of the pyschological questions that psychologists from the University of Cambridge asked about 4,000 study subjets, who were recruited through a Facebook app.

First, the participants took a survey that asked psychological questions to determine whether they empathize, systemize, or had a balance of the two. To figure that out, participants answered questions like "I always get emotional while watching movies" with strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree.
To rule out predispositions to certain types of music, they asked the participants to evaluate 50 songs from 26 genres and subgenres.

They found that empathic people tended to like mellow, unpretentious or contemporary tunes such as Norah Jones' "Come away with me" or Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah." This kind of music included country and folk songs, which is most likely where my recent obsession with country music factors in.  

The songs could express negative emotions or be a trendy techno song — the empathizers were into it. But, ask the empathizers to listen to punk or heavy metal, and their reactions weren't as favorable.

Systemizing people, on the other hand, tended to like high-energy music that conveyed positive emotions. Songs with a fair amount of complexity, like a complicated piece of classical music. People whose answers didn't have a clear distinction between systemizer or empathizer tended to have a mix of both music tastes.

Here's a graph of what kind of music empathizers (Type E), systemizers (Type S) or balanced (Type B) liked. The more positive the score, the more that group of people liked that particular musical characteristic. The more negative the score, the more people of certain groups disliked that musical characteristic.

View gallery

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(PLOS ONE)

The mean age of the people involved in the study were around their mid-twenties, but some participants were as old as 61. The researchers controlled for gender and age. Even with gender and age playing a role, the connection between empathizer/sympathizer type and taste in music was still strong.

Knowing what types of music people like based on how they process information could be important information for companies like Spotify and Apple Music. "By knowing an individual's thinking style, such services might in future be able to fine tune their music recommendations to an individual," lead researcher David Greenberg said in a news release.

Interested in seeing if your thinking style matches your taste in music? Here's a quiz that can help you determine whether you empathize, systemize, or do a little of both.