Emotional inteligence

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effects would be to impart most basic emotional intelligence
skills to children, so that they become lifelong
habits. Another high-payoff preventive strategy would
be to teach emotion management to people reaching retirement
age, since emotional well-being is one factor
that determines whether an older person declines rapidly
or thrives. A third target group might be so-called
at-risk populations—the very poor, single working
mothers, residents of high-crime neighborhoods, and
the like—who live under extraordinary pressure day in
and day out, and so might do better medically with help
in handling the emotional toll of these stresses.
2. Many patients can benefit measurably when their
psychological needs are attended to along with their
purely medical ones. While it is a step toward more humane
care when a physician or nurse offers a distressed
patient comfort and consolation, more can be done. But
emotional care is an opportunity too often lost in the
way medicine is practiced today; it is a blind spot for
medicine. Despite mounting data on the medical usefulness
of attending to emotional needs, as well as supporting
evidence for connections between the brain's emotional
center and the immune system, many physicians
remain skeptical that their patients' emotions matter
clinically, dismissing the evidence for this as trivial and