The Importance of e.q.
Merve Emre’s essay about emotional intelligence provides a useful look back at the appeal of Daniel Goleman’s book of the same name (Books, April 19th). Emre focusses on the book and its societal impact, but it is worth noting that the scientific work on which the book was in part based continues today. As Emre observes, my collaboration with Dr. Peter Salovey resulted in two articles in 1990 (and more since then), arguing for the existence of a concept that we called emotional intelligence, which is the ability to accurately perceive, utilize, reason about, and manage one’s feelings. Through our work and that of other researchers, evidence linking emotional intelligence with improved social relations has accumulated, and the idea of an “emotional quotient” is now widely accepted by scientists. Its importance is still being explored in schools and workplaces.
Emre rightly points out that emotional challenges vary according to a person’s social and political conditions. Yet all of us can likely benefit from understanding our feelings; a person who is indignant about injustice can channel that energy into effecting change. I’m hopeful that the scientific advances of the past thirty years will lead not to simple self-help prescriptions but, rather, to a more comprehensive understanding of the role that emotions play in addressing our capacities in life and the difficulties we face, both as individuals and as a society.
John D. Mayer
Professor of Psychology
University of New Hampshire
Durham, N.H.
Finding the Words
I appreciated how Alice Gregory, in her article about the history and the future of the Penobscot language, critiques the colonialist underpinnings of linguistics and language preservation (“Final Say,” April 19th). But, as someone with a background in linguistics, I felt that her argument was undercut by exoticized descriptions of Penobscot, which she portrays as “melodic, gentle, and worn-sounding” and “especially visual, efficient, and kinetic.” Virtually all languages have variations in tone or pitch, and tonal languages such as Mandarin might sound particularly “foreign” to an English speaker. Yet it seems problematic to describe a conversation in Penobscot as being “like a choir lesson” if the goal is to promote the language’s use in daily life. Gregory also observes that “single words can express full ideas” in Penobscot, but this quality, called “synthesis” by linguists, is not dissimilar to the agglutinative aspects (in which strings of suffixes and prefixes can be added to a single word) of languages such as Turkish, Hungarian, and Japanese—or even to German’s compound nouns. These languages are rarely described poetically. Though there is nothing wrong with finding a language beautiful, we should be wary of giving credence to the idea that mystical-sounding or aesthetically pleasing languages are worthier of preservation and revitalization.
Julia Clark
Los Angeles, Calif.
Vive Le Tacos
Curious readers of Lauren Collins’s charming piece on French tacos should know that they needn’t journey as far as France, Morocco, or Vietnam to sample one (“French Twist,” April 19th). When the pandemic border closure ends, those hungering for le tacos should come to Montreal. In addition to its native Francophone population, the city boasts a large French-expatriate community, and tacos have followed. Unsurprisingly, the places that specialize in them also serve similarly dense French-Canadian classics, like poutine.
Richard Matthew Pollard
Montreal, Quebec
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