Affective Development or Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

In this article, we contrast the concepts of affective development and emotional intelligence, and we relate the first to a dynamic view of psychic life and the second to an atomistic and compartmentalized view. We provide various empirical evidence to support this statement. In the first of these pieces of evidence, it is shown that the interaction between affects and cognition, manifested through affective bonds, is subject to evolution; while the second shows that the behaviour of affects (emotions as they are commonly called in specialized literature) is erratic and non-progressive throughout the lives of individuals. From this evidence, it follows that the exclusive education of emotions does not lead by itself to a harmonic maturation of individuals, since it does not respond, naturally, to progressive improvement or growth. From the latter, it follows that the interaction between the cognitive and the affective must be taken into account to achieve authentic maturation and not resort to addressing emotions in isolation and without paying attention to the fact that the affects act in interaction with the so-called processes. cognitive. This work also insists on the need to resort to a global explanatory theory of affectivity, whose application would improve the results obtained with the techniques that use the currents of so-called emotional intelligence and/or education.