What’s on your mind: the most-read brain circuits of 2025
Our regular series of short articles on the most pressing issues of the moment attracted a good deal of attention this year. Here are the 10 you viewed the most – including...
Brain Circuits
Social judgment: Emotional intelligence at work
To inspire and motivate others, tune into their feelings. So, how well do you read others’ emotions? Play this two-minute game to find out.
Click here to play the Emotional Code game.
Match each word prompt with the corresponding face expressing that emotion.
How well could you read the expressions in the Emotional Code game? The game tests your social judgment — that is, your ability to distinguish and recognize other people and their emotions. Social judgment is important to us as leaders because our problem-solving takes place in a social context where we must make sense of others and the social systems in which they operate.
Social judgment is part of a broad range of cognitive abilities that enable people to understand and interact with others. Leaders need to inspire, motivate, and enable others to perform. Social judgment enables us to create a community, fostering collaboration and connectivity. Social judgment is also important to support reputation management, as it enables us to monitor how our actions are perceived by others.
The Emotional Code game tests your ability to tune into the feelings of others. This is integral to emotional intelligence, which includes the capacity to identify emotions and understand their origins and implications. (Mayer et al, 2000). Stein et al (2009) found that emotional intelligence was related to profitability and that leaders with more of it were respected by others for their ability to manage people and organizations.
What can leaders do to boost their interpersonal insights? Here are three suggestions:
- Listen. Active and attentive listening helps leaders gain deeper insight into the emotions and concerns of others. Practice empathy to better understand how others are feeling.
- Interface. Engage with others to discover the intersection of their experiences with one’s own to see patterns, similarities, and differences in individual emotional experiences. This can help to build accuracy in social cognition.
- Mirroring. Behavior matching mirrors the posture and behavior of others, can help to build more accurate insights into how others are feeling, according to studies (e.g., Fujiwara and Daibo, 2022).
These approaches are all designed to enhance neural processing to internally simulate the effective and cognitive mental states of others. This is also known as the theory of mind, where the feelings of others are inferred and understood.
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