Why Being Able To Compartmentalize Is A Key Ingredient For Risk-Taking

Forbes:

It’s a crazy morning at home, and your spouse is furious at you. Harried, you slam the car door shut and race off to work where an important task awaits.

Your ability to tune out the situation at home and focus on the job at hand is facilitated by your emotional understanding. It’s a form of emotional intelligence, according to Jeremy Yip, a lecturer and research scholar at Wharton. Compartmentalizing enables a person to identify what is stressing them out and to allow other, unrelated factors in their life to stand on their own merits, Yip says.

But are people with high levels of emotional intelligence able to go one step further and take risks unrelated to what is stressing them out? Yes, notes Yip, whose research study, “The Emotionally Intelligent Decision-Maker: Emotion Understanding Ability Reduces the Effect of Incidental Anxiety on Risk-taking,” was published in the journal Psychological Science. His co-author is Stéphane Côté, professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at the University of Toronto.

Read the whole story: Forbes