Its official. Emotional Intelligence and cognitive skills can actually sharpen as we enter our 60s. University of California researchers at Berkeley have been studying how our emotional strategies and responses change as we age. What they are finding demonstrates that older people have an advantage both in the workplace and in personal relationships.
In the mid-1990s, Daniel Goleman sparked a shift in our thinking with the publication of his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Suddenly EIQ, Emotional Intelligence Quotient, was as important as IQ, Intelligence Quotient, which had been the gold standard for intellectual achievement. He defined Emotional Intelligence as a set of skills that included impulse control, self-motivation, empathy and competence in interpersonal and social relationships. In other words, how people manage feelings, interact, and communicate. In further work that was published in 1998, analyses by dozens of experts in 500 corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations worldwide concluded that Emotional Intelligence was the barometer of excellence on virtually any job.
What U of C researchers found most recently validated that older people are better than their younger counterparts at seeing the positive side of a stressful situation. Findings published in peer-review journals indicate that "Evolution seems to have tuned our nervous systems in ways that are optimal for these kinds of interpersonal and compassionate activities as we age," notes lead researcher Robert Levenson.
In another study, published in the July issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, researchers gauged responses of 222 healthy adults in their 20s, 40s and 60s who were wired with physiological sensors and instructed to view the same film clips from "21 Grams" and "The Champ." The older cohort showed more sadness in reaction to emotionally charged scenes, compared to their younger counterparts.
