"Let's face it – even if, as the authors suggest, 'preschoolers' E.F. capability can be measured with simple computerized tests,' chances are, this year's E.F. ('executive function') will be tomorrow's E.Q. ('emotional intelligence') which the authors deride as an unreliable predictor of academic achievement or adult success. No doubt we'll worry about that later."
Actually, let's not wait for later. Let's tackle that one right now.**
The fact that executive function and emotional intelligence can both be referred to with a pithy abbreviation beginning with "E," does not mean that they are on equally shaky scientific ground.
Executive function is the term used by scientists to describe a cluster of cognitive tasks that are the building blocks of decision-making abilities. EF includes short-term working memory, planning, self-regulation, error detection and correction, and effortful control – which is the ability to pay attention to one thing to the exclusion of another. EF is rooted in the brain's prefrontal cortex (PFC) – a conclusion first made after WWI, with war veterans who had sustained head-injuries during their service.
Study of the development of executive function in children was initially spearheaded by a Soviet psychologist, Alexander Luria, in the 1960s. Tasks Luria developed in 1966 used to test kids' EF ability are still used in labs around world. For example, there's what is called the "day/night" task. Kids are shown a series of cards, either showing drawings of the moon or the sun. They must say outloud the opposite word than the picture that is shown (e.g., "moon" when they see a sun card) – thus the task tests their ability to remember the rule, and to suppress their first instinct to describe what they are seeing.
Thus, the existence of executive function, and the brain's development of it, has been known in scientific circles for our entire lifetimes. It's been tested and retested thousands of times. The role of the components of executive function has been examined in neuroscience and in psychological experiments. What's new is neuroscientists' ability to pinpoint its location in extremely specific areas of the brain, thanks to fMRI studies. For instance, they know that what we call “paying attention” is actually the function of three distinct white-matter tracts – one that handles alerting, another orienting, and the third executive control. What makes one person's ability (to pay attention) superior to another's is the fractional anisotropy – the ratio of nerves that run parallel to the nerves that run perpendicular.
Our contribution in NurtureShock has been to report on this more recent work – how EF can be developed or hindered. We also included recent refinements on how EF plays a role in other cognitive development (e.g. why EF helps kids lie better and how lack of sleep disrupts EF). But even that scientific research has been going on for a decade or more.
There is no doubt that further refinements in the understanding of EF will come. (For example, they are still working out how EF relates to autism.) But no one in the scientific community ever suggests that EF is merely a theory.
Now, let's compare the history of EF to the history of EQ.
According to Dean of Yale College Peter Salovey's own account (made in a speech to the American Psychological Association), he and professor John Mayer hypothesized that there may be such a thing as "an emotional intelligence," which they defined as: “The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action.” And then, as scientists do, they set out to develop a way to see if such an emotional intelligence did exist.
While Salovey and Mayer were still working out how to even test their theory, they were contacted by journalist Daniel Goleman – who asked if it would be all right to use their term as the title for a book he was writing. Not really conjecturing about what that could possibly mean, and a bit tickled that someone else was even thinking about their theory, they said that Goleman could use the term for his book. That was pretty much the sum total of the scholars' interaction with Goleman.
Then in 1995, Goleman published his book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ. In it, Goleman wrote lines like: “…what data exist, suggest [emotional intelligence] can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ.”
Salovey was horrified. Because the truth was there was no data in existence to support that claim. The reality was that emotional intelligence was still little more than an untested theory. Salovey and Mayer were years away from proving it that emotional intelligence existed; and it would take years after that to actually find out the effect of having it was.
That didn't stop what Salovey describes as "outrageous claims" about emotional intelligence from continuing. In 1998, Goleman asserted that " …nearly 90% of the difference” between star performers at work and average ones is due to EI, while another writer claimed, “EI accounts for over 85% of outstanding performance in top leaders," and "“EI – not IQ – predicts top performance.”
Again, there was no data to support any of that.
The worst part of all this for Salovey and his colleagues, is that – for the past ten years – other scientists routinely chastise them for promises about emotional intelligence that the scholars themselves have never made.
To date, Salovey and his colleagues still believe there is something called emotional intelligence. But they acknowledge that the jury is still out. Salovey's own data has shown that emotional intelligence isn't always a benefit. He's finding that high-EQ insurance adjusters, for example, are less effective in their jobs – perhaps because they get so emotionally involved with their clients, that they function less efficiently.
By now, other scientists have been studying the existence of emotional intelligence. And their research is also inconclusive.
Emotional intelligence isn't predictive of academic achievement. On the other hand, scholars such as Carroll Izard have found that kids who are high in verbal IQ – what we might consider to be a more "traditional" form of intelligence – also tend to be higher in emotional intelligence.
Even if there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, scientists are years away from being able to locate this in the brain.
It's making unfounded assertions like Goleman that get us into trouble in the first place.
Pamela Paul would have you believe that us touting EF is like Goleman touting EQ. Really, it's Paul here operating like Goleman – making claims without any scientific support. Her claim may get her applause for being snarky and skeptical – but it should have been sent to another department for fact-checking.
The ultimate irony is that in NurtureShock, EF is discussed in a chapter on a preschool curriculum known as Tools of the Mind. During the same time frame that Pamela Paul was writing her review – and making her bogus assertion that EF’s a fad – a New York Times Magazine editor, Paul Tough, was writing a glowing 4,000 word article about Tools of the Mind and the importance of EF to kids. (His article covered identical ground to our chapter.)
Mr. Tough’s article ran last Sunday, a week before Ms. Paul’s critique.
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**We should first note that, Ms. Paul's review was somewhat favorable, and we are not ungrateful for the coverage, but anytime people make unfounded assertions relating to the science of child development, they need to be corrected. That's one of the stated purposes of this blog. And it's a statement that we would have corrected whether she had written it in a review of our book, or anyone else's.
