Dr. Ed Dunkelblau has two master's
degrees from Columbia University, one in psychology and
the other in vocational and rehabilitation counseling,
and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University
of Kansas. He has been in clinical practice for 20 years,
is past president of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic
Humor (AATH), is approved supervisor for the Association
for Marriage and Family Therapy, and director of the Institute
for Emotionally Intelligent Learning. For further information,
see the AATH website at www.aath.org and the Institute's
website at www.teacheq.com
.
What is emotional intelligence?
It's another way of being smart. We typically think of
intelligence as IQ-the ability to learn and succeed in
school-based academic kinds of endeavors. But we've found
that there are other ways that we're "smart." Those social
and emotionally intelligent ways seem to be more connected
to success than traditional IQ. Daniel Goleman describes
five areas of social/emotional literacy in his book, Emotional
Intelligence . The five areas are:
- to recognize one's own emotions
- to express emotions and not act on one's impulses
- to recognize the emotional experience of others and
to experience empathy
- to deal with others' emotions in the context of a
positive relationship
- to motivate oneself toward a positive goal, to learn
from feedback and to solve problems.
How did you become interested
in EI?
I have been a psychotherapist for the past 20 years and
have worked with clients to help them develop their social/emotional
skills. When Goleman wrote his book, he labeled and popularized
what I had been doing for a long time, so it became an easy
and convenient way to summarize and describe what we were
pursuing in psychotherapy.
So what link do you see between
humor and emotional intelligence?
What we do in psychotherapy via social/emotional skill-building
is to help clients understand their experience in a new
way-to see the world in a way that's healthful, allowing
them to deal with their own struggles and challenges constructively.
To experience humor and laughter, we also have to see the
world differently, in a slightly tilted way. We're forced
not to take our experience so seriously and to recognize
there are alternative ways to understand what we're going
through, some of which are funny. By doing this, we're able
to expand and develop our world view and our self-perception.
A lot of humor relies on inducing
a shift in perspective; it gives you a different point of
view from which to watch yourself.
Exactly. Harvey Mindess talks about "taking a God's eye
view," where you rise above your own e x p e r i e n c e
and look down upon it, letting it entertain you. It's a
way to be less self-centered and less self-absorbed-to see
the bigger picture and a different truth; to appreciate
and enjoy what goes on; to gain respite from a painful or
trying circumstance; to connect with another human being.
I can use my sense of humor
to help me shift my perspective, but it must be a little
trickier to use humor to help someone else shift his/her
perspective.
Yes, it takes a lot of skill to unveil social imperfections
and to get people to laugh at them instead of being hurt
by them. This is why political humorists exist. They're
able to say, "Look, the emperor has no clothes on!" without
getting killed. In fact, the modern political humorist is
the descendent of the old court jester. Jesters used to
carry a little jester doll with them which they would "kill"
when the king said, "Off with his head!" As long as the
jester was entertaining the king, he could pretty much get
away with anything, unlike everyone else in the kingdom.
It's the same nowadays-if you are funny, you can say a lot
more than if you're not being funny.
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