From IQ to SQ

By now, everybody knows about "emotional intelligence" and the EQ (the social and emotional equivalent of IQ) movement among school psychologists and managers. The concept was made popular by Daniel Goleman in his best-selling book "Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ." A Harvard Ph.D. in research psychology and one-time science writer for The New York Times, Goleman is a Buddhist and a mind-body pioneer who blends Oriental practice with Western knowledge of the brain. Success in school or work, he shows, depends less on cold intellect than upon warm emotional qualities such as empathy.

Goleman's EQ crusade set the stage for work in "spiritual intelligence," or SQ, and several dozen young psychologists are now working in this growing field, researching topics such as forgiveness, humility, gratitude, and hope. In fact, SQ has turned out to be the most exciting branch of "positive psychology," with its attempt to liberate the trade from decades of one-eyed obsession with mental disease: frustration, aggression, anger, paranoia, neurosis, and other pathologies.

SQ clearly belongs with seven other forms of intelligence defined by Harvard's Howard Gardner: linguistic skill, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, musical, kinesthetic (athletic talent), interpersonal (mainly EQ), intrapersonal. Gardner used tough criteria to show that each intelligence is used to solve problems and fashion products in particular cultures and communities.

The SQ field earned its charter two years ago when Robert A. Emmons, research psychologist at the University of California at Davis, used experiments to show exactly how SQ fulfills the Gardner criteria. For example, it has an identifiable core or set of operations, an evolutionary history and plausibility, characteristic patterns of development, and support from psychometric findings. One could add that it's also good for you and improves with practice.

Here are a few lines of SQ research reported to a panel organized by the National Institute of Healthcare Research (NIHR):

Long after psychologists found how the stress of anger--especially anger over unjust treatment--drives up blood pressure, a series of experiments at the University of Wisconsin found that the capacity to forgive may be the first line of defense against anger's boomerang. Another experiment reported at the last American Psychological Association (APA) convention found that just being reminded of unfair treatment drove up blood pressure in four seconds. Those able to forgive brought down their blood pressure much faster than those who remained angry.

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