1.2 From Emotions and Feelings to Socio-emotional Skills

Altogether emotions are represented into the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI).

 It has been presented as a complex integrative concept and linked to personality traits that contribute to define the emotional intelligence itself. Furnam and Petrides’ model proposes 15 specific personality traits. With this concept some authors refer to a broad ability, equivalent to verbal or numerical ability except that the content domain is emotions rather than words or numbers (Mayer, Caruso, & Salovey, 2016).

Already in the nineties Salovey and Mayer’s (1990) expanded the concept of EI opening to motivation and a social component. They proposed a conceptualization of EI as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions”.

Later studies came up with an umbrella description of EI (Elfenbein & MacCann, 2017; Mayer et al., 2016) that includes:

• Perceive emotions: the ability to make judgments of another person's emotional state based on verbal and nonverbal expressions (e.g., tone of voice, facial expression, and posture)
• Express emotions: the ability to accurately convey or express an emotional state so that it is easily recognized by others
• Understand emotions: knowledge of how emotions progress over time, how they link to situational factors, and how they blend
• Regulate own emotions: the ability to regulate one's own emotions, up‐regulating positive emotions, and down‐regulating negative ones (and occasionally vice versa)
• Regulate others' emotions: the ability to regulate other people's emotions, up‐regulating positive emotions, and down‐regulating negative emotions (and occasionally vice versa)
• Regulate Emotion attention: the ability to regulate one's attention toward or away from emotional information

Within a real-life, practice-oriented, comprehensive framework based on research literature (Jones & Bailey, 2016; Jones & Bouffard, 2012), social and emotional skills are grouped into three conceptual categories:

o    Emotional processes include emotional knowledge and expression, emotional and behavioral regulation, and empathy.

o    Social/interpersonal skills include understanding social cues, interpreting others’ behaviors and perspective-taking, navigating social situations, interacting positively with peers and adults, and behaving in a prosocial manner.

o    Cognitive regulation includes basic executive functions such as attention control, response inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility or set shifting.

The authors apply a developmental lens to this topic and suggest that skills are salient at different developmental moments, with early skills laying the foundation for those that come later.  These developments emphasize the role of both a behavioral and an interpersonal component within the context of one’s culture, neighborhood, and interpersonal situation where the interaction occurs (Elfenbein & MacCann, 2017), strengthening the link between the emotional and social component of human functioning and their development, and at the same time, orienting the attention to ‘skills’. And a broad definition of social and emotional skills describes them as ‘the kind of skills involved in achieving goals, working with others, and managing emotions’ (OECD, 2015).