Emotional mumbo-jumbo?

Gravity is a truth of a fundamentally different order from notions like love, depression or personality. It causes apples to fall on people's heads, while concepts like personality are just convenient, relatively woolly psychological constructs we use to talk about what it is to be human. Fuzziness is understandable - maybe even desirable. It may more faithfully reflect the workings of the human mind, which are harder to capture in hard scientific terms than the physical world.

Unlike the mature field of physics, psychology is a young science. Even the most basic psychological truths are open to debate. Unlike current theories in quantum physics, most people have an opinion on new psychological theories. Psychology is easier to render understandable and is closer to the layperson's personal experience. Consequently, the public is regularly assailed by vulgarised versions of fresh psychological 'breakthroughs'.

One smash hit among the recent crop vying to reach household-name status is emotional intelligence. The term was voted by the American Dialect Society one of the most popular new phrases to enter the English language in the last decade of the 20th century. As a scientific concept, it was created by Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer.

The concept reflects an emerging shift in thinking about intelligence in general and how it can be measured. Intelligence is traditionally thought of as a single overall ability, best measured by a select group of skills. Being good at abstract thinking shows a person is bright, while being a good swimmer or cook does not. But many experts now talk in terms of a constellation of intelligences, including creative, practical and social.

Emotional intelligence also ties in with the latest thinking about the nature of human passion and reason - no longer seen as opposites. Instead of being regarded as chaotic, random and immature, emotions are now seen as adaptive responses that actually help people organise their behaviour. Having the 'intelligence' to be in touch with ones own emotions and with other people's, therefore, is a distinct advantage in all spheres of life.

Emotional intelligence is essentially about systemising and using phenomena that may otherwise remain at an instinctive level: perceiving and identifying emotions, using emotions to facilitate thought, understanding emotions and managing or controlling them. The recent academic Handbook of Emotional Intelligence sees potential for schools, businesses and at home.

Being able to measure emotional intelligence is, therefore, crucial. If it can be harnessed in any systematic way, it must be possible to measure it. Yet there is no agreed-upon method to do so. This is a serious drawback. If changes based on emotional intelligence are introduced into a workplace, for example, minimum best practice dictates that the results ought to be testable.