This month's American Psychologist (September 2008) had an excellent article by John Mayer, Peter Salovay, and David Caruso on Emotional Intelligence -- not the EI that has been subverted by pop psychology, but the real deal -- quantifying and qualifying social intelligence as an ACTUAL intelligence, not personality traits such as gregariousness, or emotional states such as happiness, self-esteem, and so forth.
The article is in part a response to the confusion in the field caused by the popular (but misguided) book "Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ", by Daniel Goleman. Goleman (and others who followed him) muddied the clinical waters by skewing the original research done by Mayer, Salovay, and Caruso in the 90s. The original work posits that emotional intelligence -- the ability to correctly read and respond to social cues -- is in fact a type of cognitive intelligence -- NOT just some fuzzy, nice-to-have adaptive behaviors.
The conceptualization of social relatedness as a true component of intelligence is key -- it helps enormously to clearly define what is a disability, which in turn will help those with ASD conditions to secure appropriate services.
Mayer et al make a very good case for the fact that social relatedness (or the lack thereof) is a TRAIT -- that is, a relatively unmutable part of who we are, probably in large part defined genetically, much as hair and eye color.
What Goleman et al have done with their work (interesting as it may be) is confuse these TRAITS with STATES -- states being transient emotional responses to environment -- happiness, feelings of self-esteem, being magnanimous, etc. The danger here is that we can't build a case for disability based on a client's being unhappy. We CAN build a case for disability based on a deficit in social cognition, when severe enough.
Further, focusing on social issues as traits rather than states brings into sharper focus the work we need to do -- continue to socialize the idea that social relatedness is not a choice that can be overcome by cajoling our clients/students, or forcing them to be something they are not -- it is, biochemically -- who they are, and they deserve our respect and kindness as they are.
