How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence | Dr. Marc Brackett
Summary
Dr. Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a comprehensive framework for understanding and developing emotional intelligence as a learnable skill set. The conversation covers how to recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate emotions in both ourselves and others. Central themes include the importance of emotional vocabulary, the role of “permission to feel,” and how emotional intelligence intersects with personality, communication, and relationships.
Key Takeaways
- Emotional intelligence is a set of discrete, trainable skills — not a fixed personality trait — and can be increased at any stage of life.
- Emotion granularity matters: distinguishing between similar emotions (e.g., anxiety vs. stress vs. overwhelm vs. fear) is essential for choosing the right coping strategy.
- Connecting a feeling to its cause is more important than simply labeling it — the “why” determines which regulation strategy will actually work.
- Behavior does not reliably indicate emotion: a child stomping their feet may be feeling shame, not anger. Mislabeling emotions in others leads to ineffective responses.
- Suppressing emotions tends to amplify them in Western cultural contexts; cognitive reappraisal is generally more effective than suppression.
- Only ~30% of adults report having had someone in their life who gave them genuine “permission to feel” — a significant driver of poor emotional regulation in adulthood.
- Emojis and text messaging reduce emotional granularity and can degrade emotion perception skills, particularly in children and adolescents.
- Personality traits (e.g., introversion, neuroticism) are largely uncorrelated with emotional intelligence — knowing your personality helps you choose better regulation strategies, but does not determine your EQ.
- The “RULER” framework (Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, Regulate) provides a structured roadmap for developing emotional intelligence.
- People who facilitate “permission to feel” share three key traits: non-judgment, empathy/compassion, and active listening.
Detailed Notes
The RULER Framework: A Skills-Based Model of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is defined by Dr. Brackett not as a single trait but as five discrete, learnable skills, captured in the acronym RULER:
- R — Recognize: Self-awareness of one’s own emotional state and reading emotions in others through facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone.
- U — Understand: Identifying the cause of an emotion and its likely consequences. Asking “why am I feeling this way?”
- L — Label: Using precise emotional vocabulary. Not just “angry” but “irritable,” “enraged,” “livid,” or “peeved.”
- E — Express: Knowing when and how to express emotions appropriately, depending on context, relationship, and culture.
- R — Regulate: Applying strategies to manage emotions — the most complex and consequential skill.
These skills apply both to the self and to others simultaneously. They are not highly correlated with each other, meaning someone can be strong in recognition but weak in regulation.
Emotion Granularity and Vocabulary
Emotion differentiation (distinguishing between emotions) and granularity (precision within a single emotion category) are central to effective emotional functioning.
- Conflating emotions leads to mismatched strategies. Example: anxiety involves uncertainty about the future and may require a cognitive strategy (e.g., challenging uncontrollable thoughts). Stress involves too many demands relative to resources. Overwhelm is a state of saturation. These require different interventions.
- Anger vs. disappointment: Anger involves a perceived injustice; disappointment involves unmet expectations with no wrongdoing. Misidentifying one for the other leads parents, teachers, and partners to respond ineffectively.
- Happiness vs. contentment: Happiness is often tied to achievement and can paradoxically backfire when pursued directly. Contentment is a state of completeness with the present — “I have enough.” Research suggests over-focusing on happiness can increase despair.
Practical exercise used in corporate training: Ask groups to define and distinguish between anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, and overwhelm. Most people initially say they’re all the same. Working through the distinctions typically takes 45–60 minutes and leads directly to better strategy selection.
The Mood Meter: Mapping Emotional Space
A practical tool used in the RULER program, the Mood Meter plots emotional states on two axes:
- X-axis (horizontal): Pleasantness — from unpleasant (left) to pleasant (right)
- Y-axis (vertical): Energy/Activation — from low energy (bottom) to high energy (top)
This creates four quadrants:
| Quadrant | Color | Energy | Pleasantness | Example Emotions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top-right | 🟡 Yellow | High | Pleasant | Excited, happy, ecstatic, optimistic |
| Bottom-right | 🟢 Green | Low | Pleasant | Calm, content, tranquil, peaceful |
| Bottom-left | 🔵 Blue | Low | Unpleasant | Sad, hopeless, disappointed, despair |
| Top-left | 🔴 Red | High | Unpleasant | Angry, anxious, afraid |
- Unpleasant emotions are deliberately not labeled “negative” — they carry important information and are a normal part of the human experience.
- The tool is used with preschoolers through CEOs in the RULER program, currently in ~5,000 schools across the US.
- A key insight: emotions are impermanent. A five-year-old in the program, when asked if he needed a regulation strategy because he was in the “blue,” responded: “No, because I know it’s impermanent.”
Permission to Feel
A core concept in Brackett’s recent research: many people lack the foundational permission to feel — the internalized sense that their emotions are valid and safe to express.
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Research with tens of thousands of participants across cultures found that only ~30% of adults felt they had someone in childhood who created conditions for them to feel emotionally safe.
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These “permission-grantors” (he calls them “Uncle Marvins” or “Aunt Maras”) share three consistent characteristics:
- Non-judgmental presence
- Empathy and compassion
- Active listening
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This role doesn’t have to be a parent — it can be a teacher, coach, therapist, or colleague. An emotional mentor at work is equally valid.
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Two primary barriers to giving others permission to feel:
- Time — people report not having time to be emotionally present
- Skill deficits — fear of not being able to handle what someone shares; under-developed co-regulation capacity
Emotion Regulation: Suppression vs. Reappraisal
- Suppression of emotions tends to increase their intensity in Western cultural contexts.
- Cognitive reappraisal — changing how one thinks about a situation — is generally more effective.
- Choosing the right strategy depends on accurately identifying both the emotion and its source. A breathing exercise may not be helpful for anxiety rooted in uncontrollable future worries; a cognitive strategy (e.g., identifying what is and isn’t within one’s control) is more appropriate.
- Personality traits inform strategy selection: an introvert who is drained after social interaction needs different recovery strategies than an extrovert.
Emotional Intelligence and Personality: Separate Constructs
- Introversion and extroversion describe a proclivity for energy use, not emotional intelligence.
- Neuroticism (emotional volatility) is not correlated with low emotional intelligence. Highly neurotic individuals may actually practice regulation more frequently and develop stronger skills as a result.
- Creative individuals often score high on both introversion and extroversion — introverted during creation, extroverted when promoting their work.
- Knowing your personality traits helps you select regulation strategies that fit your natural operating system.
Technology, Communication, and Emotional Intelligence
- Emojis represent excessive “lumping” of the emotional spectrum into simplified icons, potentially degrading emotion differentiation and granularity.
- Text messaging reduces face-