Marc Brackett, Ph.D., is a professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University and the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI). The YCEI conducts research on the science of emotions and emotional intelligence and develops ways to teach these skills to children and adults. Since it was founded in 2013, the YCEI has helped over 5 million children in over 5,000 schools worldwide develop their emotional intelligence skills. Success+ talked with Brackett about the YCEI and emotional intelligence.
S+: What is the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence?
MB: The YCEI is a group of about 50 people who do two things. We research the science of emotions and the skills of emotional intelligence, and we develop innovative approaches to teaching emotional intelligence to children and adults who are raising and teaching them.
S+: How does the YCEI define emotional intelligence?
MB: We use an acronym, which is RULER… to describe the skills. And those are: Recognizing emotions in oneself and other people; Understanding our own and others’ causes of emotion (what makes us feel the way we do); Labeling emotions precisely, using the best possible word to describe our experiences; [and] knowing how and when to Express emotions with different people across context and culture. Finally, the last “R” is Regulation, or the strategies that we use to help us both manage our own feelings [and] help other people manage [their own].
S+: How did the YCEI get started, and why is this work important to you?
MB: I thought it was necessary to have a place at a university that both studied the power of emotional intelligence [and] also translated that into actionable practices for leaders, teachers, students and families. I felt it was important to keep those two things together—that we were in the real world, looking at how people would implement this. We’re also doing the science and letting the science inform the practice and the practice inform the science.
I was very fortunate in my career. I got my doctorate degree with one founder of a theory of emotional intelligence. His name is Jack Mayer. Then I did my postdoctoral fellowship with the other founder of emotional intelligence theory, Peter Salovey, who became president of Yale. In 2013, when Peter became president of the university, we spoke about converting the laboratory that he was directing and I was helping to direct… into a center of the university to really showcase the university’s commitment to the science and practice of emotional intelligence.
What’s amazing is that since that time, we have now worked with over 5,000 schools across the globe. RULER, which is also the name of our program, is now in schools across the United States. And we actually have schools in over 25 countries around the world that have adopted this model. I’m proud to say that we have impacted the lives of well over 5 million children.
S+: What are some of the most important discoveries around emotional intelligence you’ve made within the YCEI?
MB: I think the first is that we stand firm that these are real skills that have to be developed in relationship with other people—meaning that our emotion system is co-created through the people that we associate with. And so, helping people to build quality relationships, to learn about their own and other people’s emotions, to have the words to describe those emotions is something that needs to be cultivated and developed. That’s really kind of core to our work. And the same thing with emotion regulation. Oftentimes, people think, “Oh my gosh. I’m so emotional. I can’t deal with it.” The only reason is that they haven’t learned the skills.
Practice the skills and refine them over time. It is possible to get better at reading people and also at dealing with your own and other people’s emotions.
The second is that I felt it was really important to be able to translate all of this scientific work into a program that could be adopted by school systems so that children starting in preschool [can learn] these skills and further develop them across their time in school, from elementary to middle to high school, because these skills [aren’t] one-and-done.
[For example,] what anger means to me at 5 [years old] is different than at 10 [and] at 15. And so, what we want to do is help children deepen their understanding of these concepts and their skills and understanding them and dealing with them.
S+: What are some of the most vital lessons you want people to know when it comes to emotional intelligence?
MB: The first thing is that the adults who are raising and teaching kids—we’ve shown in research—have not had a very strong education in these concepts. So, when we first started out, we thought we could just have a curriculum to hand over. What we learned over time was that teachers and other counselors and educators and school leaders really wanted an education in these skills so they [could] practice them themselves [and] be better at implementing them right in the classroom. That was a big lesson for us.
One of the other products that we’ve created is an app called “How We Feel” and that app is based on a book I wrote called Permission to Feel. In the app, which is available for free, we provide people with hundreds of emotions and their definitions, as well as dozens of research-based strategies to help them learn how to regulate their emotions and the ability to track their emotions over time so they can look for patterns and gain deeper insights to support greater well-being.
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