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Emotional Intelligence
What Is Critical Feeling?
How you can use your feelings to improve your life
Posted April 7, 2016
How can teachers incite enthusiasm in their students? What does it take to play an instrument or make crafts? How do we acquire refined tastes for music, food, and fashion? What could we do to get rid of unjustified fear or anger? How can we cope with chronic illness? What keeps love alive?
All these questions have to do with critical feeling. More precisely, they ask how we can create and maintain desired feelings; modify undesired feelings; or use feelings to gather information or to optimize outcomes.
Critical feeling denotes the strategic use of feelings to improve lives and communities. It is derived from the well-known concept of critical thinking, which is the use of reasoning capacities to achieve optimal outcomes.
Why is critical thinking not enough? First, feelings are ubiquitous. Research suggests that each act of seeing, hearing, and thinking is laden with feelings. It is impossible not to feel. Instead of suppressing feelings, like the main proponents of critical thinking propose, we should take feelings seriously and try to include them when we try to improve our life.
Second, feelings are often appropriate. Of course, inappropriate feelings exist, like unprovoked anger or unjustified fear; nevertheless, feelings provide us with information about what is important to us. Suppressing feelings comes at a cost because it increases stress and depletes cognitive resources—and the feelings rebound as soon as they are no longer hold in check. These drawbacks suggest we need more sophisticated means to regulate our feelings.
Third, while critical thinking is strong when we are searching the truth, it is feeble when it comes to aesthetic or moral values. We need refined taste to create and appreciate beauty, and we need a moral compass that allows us to spontaneously act in the right way in a given situation. As implementing such values includes feeling, critical thinking is not enough. We need critical feeling.
The idea of critical feeling goes back to early Chinese thought. Confucius advocated the idea that we should start from the nature of a person and give it the right direction. In the same vein, we should look what our feelings are, determine whether they are appropriate to the situation, and build on them to give them the right direction. Of course, humans have always used feelings to better their lot. Confucius was one of the earliest thinkers to document this approach. What has been lacking is a systematic overview on feeling-based methods and techniques that are supported by empirical evidence.
Although there is some overlap between critical feeling and existing approaches in psychology, critical feeling is a new concept and goes beyond those accounts. Critical feeling is not the same as emotional intelligence. The latter is an aptitude to circumvent undesired emotions and to read emotions of others. While emotional intelligence focuses on stable dispositions of a person, critical feeling focuses on doing the right thing in a given situation. Moreover, emotional intelligence is restricted to emotions.
Critical feeling, on the other hand, includes emotions but goes beyond them by including moods, preferences, bodily states and so-called metacognitive feelings like the feeling of rightness or familiarity. Critical feeling is much broader than emotional intelligence in that it helps explain the learning of skills, refining one’s taste, or increasing the appeal of religious rituals. Finally, emotional intelligence does not care much about values while critical feeling is embedded in the practices and thus norms and values of a community. In sum, emotional intelligence is something we have while critical feeling is something we do. Similarly, critical feeling overlaps with but is not the same as emotional competences, positive psychology, or mindfulness.
In this blog on critical feeling, I shall provide answers to the question of how we can use and when we can trust our feelings in a modern world. In the same way that there are rules for the proper use of thinking, there are rules for the proper use of feeling. Although no panacea, critical feeling may help improve our lives in incremental steps.
References:
This entry is based on:
Reber, R. (2016). Critical feeling. How to use feelings strategically. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
On Confucianism, see:
Slingerland, E. G. (2003). Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. New York: Oxford University Press.
Slingerland, E. G. (2014). Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science and the Power of Spontaneity. New York: Crown.
On emotional intelligence, see:
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Book.
Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, cognition and personality, 9, 185-211.
Waterhouse, L. (2006). Multiple intelligences, the Mozart effect, and emotional intelligence: A critical review. Educational Psychologist, 41, 207-225.
