What is emotional intelligence?

World Mental Health Day 2026 is on 10 October. It's a day to raise awareness of, and reflect on, mental health and what it means to look after our wellbeing. Emotions play a big role in how we feel from day to day, but what exactly are emotions, and what is emotional intelligence?

We spoke to Dr Emma Hepburn, also known as The Psychology Mum. Emma is a clinical psychologist who is passionate about making mental health, wellbeing and neuroscience accessible for everyone. She explains what emotions are, why they matter, and how they can affect our mental health and wellbeing.

What is an emotion?

This looks like a simple question and most people respond with a version of 'how we feel', and they are correct. However, once we dive into the question a bit more, it becomes trickier to answer than it initially looks. This is because there are lots of definitions of emotions (some recent research found 92 definitions) and a number of different theories. Ultimately emotions ARE about how we feel – but to understand them better we need to look a bit more at the science.

According to the current science of emotions, our brain constructs them by combining lots of different information (or ingredients) to help us make sense of these feelings. The ingredients that make up an emotion include:

• Our body sensations or how we feel: These are affected by lots of different things, including how stressed we feel, whether we have slept or eaten, and lots of other processes in the body we aren’t always aware of.
• The situation we are in: How we interpret the sensation will depend on what’s happening at the time. We can interpret the same sensation differently in different situations.
• Our language: The language we use helps describes the feeling. Different cultures and different people use different language for emotions.
• Our past experience: This helps us notice and understand patterns of information. This shows that what we learn is important for understanding emotions.

Constructing emotions is a bit like baking – your brain combines all these ingredients to produce an emotion. Emotions are therefore the words and learned concepts we use to make sense of how we feel, in relation to the situation we are in.

Why do we have emotions?

We experience a lot of emotions throughout our lives. A scientific study found that we experience at least one emotion 90% of the time. This is because emotions are an important part of our brain functioning and support several different brain and body processes. They help us make sense of the world, remember information, identify threat and danger, and, importantly, connect with others and form bonds. Emotions can also be thought of as body signals – information that indicates our needs so we can take action to support them. Even those emotions that don’t feel pleasant play important roles, for example fear can help us identify and respond to a threat, and sadness can demonstrate that we need some extra support. In fact, these unpleasant emotions are also really important for humans – without them we wouldn’t survive very long as a species!

How we feel is linked to our thoughts and behaviours. How we think and what we do can influence how we feel. For example, doing exercise can boost our mood, and having negative thoughts about yourself can reduce your mood. However, this works in both directions – we also know that how you feel can influence your thoughts and behaviour. For example, if you're feeling low you are more likely to have negative thoughts and notice negative information, and may feel less motivated or able to do things.

Although emotions are a normal part of brain functioning, how we experience these can vary a lot between people. Different people can experience different emotions in response to the same event, and people vary in how they experience emotions – for example, some people feel them more intensely or they last longer. How we feel at any one time will be down to a range of different factors, including our background and own individual differences, what’s going on in our life and what’s happening in our brains and bodies.

There are many different emotions that you can experience. The most common emotions that people describe feeling are happiness, love, anxiety, anger, sadness and fear. However, there are thousands of words for emotions, and this means that there are as many possible emotions that you could potentially experience. There are even some words that exist in certain languages that don’t exist in others, for example Schadenfreude in German, which means the feeling of pleasure at someone else’s misfortune. However, many people can only describe their emotions with simple terms such as “good’ and “bad”. This is important because our ability to describe emotions with words helps us manage our feelings.

What is emotional intelligence?

You may hear people speak about emotional intelligence, or emotional IQ. Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, understand, use, and manage our emotions. This concept was popularised by psychologist Daniel Goldman in a book in the 1990s. He suggested emotional intelligence can be broken into five parts: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Whether we should call these skills emotional intelligence is debated by experts. However, there is good evidence that learning skills to understand, respond to and manage emotions can help us throughout life.

Understanding and knowing how to respond to emotions is linked to better mental and physical health and can help us navigate life challenges, develop good relationships, adapt to changes and manage life stressors. These skills can also help us notice and respond effectively to emotions, and be aware when our emotions are having a negative impact, which can help us stay healthy and well. In addition, knowing how to respond effectively to emotions in both ourselves and others can make us feel more confident and in control.

If you'd like to hear more from Emma about developing the skills to improve your emotional intelligence, head to this page.

If you need support

You should always tell someone about the things you’re worried about. You can tell a friend, parent, guardian, teacher, or another trusted adult. If you're struggling with your mental health, going to your GP can be a good place to start to find help. Your GP can let you know what support is available to you, suggest different types of treatment and offer regular check-ups to see how you’re doing.

If you’re in need of in-the-moment support you can contact Childline, where you can speak to a counsellor. Their lines are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

There are more links to helpful organisations on the BBC Bitesize Action Line page for young people.