Emotional Intelligence

Recently published neuroimaging research provides evidence that the directional connectivity between several brain regions plays an important role in emotional processing abilities.

Although interest in emotional intelligence has been steadily growing since the 1990s, the underlying neural mechanisms behind it have yet to be clearly established. The new study, which appears in NeuroImage, is part of a process to begin to fill in this gap in scientific knowledge.

“Emotional intelligence is one of the least studied topics, especially in conjunction with cutting-edge computational neuroimaging techniques,” explained lead researcher Sahil Bajaj, the director of the Multimodal Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory at Boys Town National Research Hospital.

“For the last 11 years, I have been using some cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques, including directed functional (e.g., Granger causality) and effective (e.g., dynamic causal modeling) brain connectivity, which allow estimation of directional information flow among brain regions.”

“While most of the existing studies have focused on small-scale functional brain connectivity correlates of emotional intelligence, to my knowledge, no work (prior to this work) has ever been published that talked about the association between strength of directional information flow among brain regions and emotional intelligence,” Bajaj said. “I have always been fascinated by directionality of information flow among brain areas, which really raised my interest in exploring the complex causal neural interactions underlying emotional intelligence.”  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, Click Here...