Intelligent About Emotions

After finishing the “Emotoscope” ap for Facebook I was shaking dust from my brain to come up w/ another fun way for people to learn about feelings. Said to Patty (my wife), “How about a cool online EQ jeopardy game?”

istock_000002420436xsmall.jpg“Boring” – she said it more delicately. “I mean, what would you ask?” **

Emma (8) is listening in (as usual – big ears!!) and pipes up, “jealousy?”

Right on! “What is jealousy?” I continue to Patty, “Or how about ‘ a little anger + sadness’?” Blank look from Patty, Emma again:

“disappointment?”

Whoa! Emotional literacy in action.

And not enough. Maybe being intelligent about emotions is the foundation. Then the graduate course: to be intelligent with emotions.

** in defense of Patty: her point was that this game has only “right/wrong” answers and our learning philosophy commits us to deeper forms of reflection

2 Replies to “Intelligent About Emotions”

  1. Hi Josh

    A really neat application and I have invited my own readers to use it in their pursuit of emotional intelligence.

    I would be really interested to know more about the ideas and assumptions on emotions and moods you used in creating the Emotoscope.

    best JOHN

  2. Thanks John!

    As you can see, we started by using the 4 most basic categories of “glad, sad, mad, afraid” – which is not as sophisticated as some models, of course, but easy to “get.” Then we took the assumption that all feelings have value, basically:

    Glad: reinforcement of what’s “good”; energizing
    Sad: reinforcement of what we care about; reflecting
    Mad: reinforcement of what we don’t like; motivating
    Afraid: questioning risk; evaluating

    Then we applied these based on our own perceptions to write the sentence stems and the notes.

    Does that help?

    Warmly,
    – Josh

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