Build Your EQ With These 7 Constructive Thinking Tools

Having factual knowledge is beneficial. To achieve your greatest ambitions in life, however, you’re better off if you can apply that knowledge in practical situations. Some psychologists define wisdom as the ability to solve life’s interpersonal dilemmas, not extensive understanding of academic subjects or specialties. "Emotional intelligence" is important, but it can be difficult to define or measure. Instead of synthesizing this diffuse quality, the solution may be to see how it relates to personality.

If wisdom is the ability to manage interpersonal situations, then emotional intelligence may be more readily defined and quantified from a personality perspective. In this case, this is not necessarily about Freud or even the widely-accepted Five Factor Model. It is a view of personality that focuses on understanding our thoughts as a way to peer into our psyches.

According to the cognitive approach to personality, the way we interpret situations determines how we’ll feel and react. You can change your thoughts as a way to change your emotions and even your behavior. The cognitive-behavioral model is one of the most widely-accepted approaches to psychotherapy.

From helping you deal with anxiety to allowing you to master depression, cognitive-behavioral methods take the two-pronged approach of helping you 1.) change your interpretations of situations while you 2.) change your typical way of reacting to them. With guidance, you can gain a more realistic view of yourself and your experiences over time.

How do you measure the personality qualities that best help you adapt to life’s challenges? The Constructive Thinking Inventory is an instrument developed in the 1990s (Epstein, 1992) that allows you to assess your own ability to implement your emotional intelligence. Although I cannot reproduce the entire instrument here, these representative items from its 7 scales can give you some insight into your own strengths and weaknesses in each area.

Rate yourself on each item from 1 (definitely false) to 5 (definitely true). If possible, try to avoid the 3 (“undecided”):

1. When something unfortunate happens to me, it reminds me of all the other things wrong in my life, which adds to my unhappiness.
2. I think about how I will deal with threatening events ahead of time, but I don’t worry needlessly.
3. When I am faced with a difficult task, I think encouraging thoughts that help me to do my best.
4. If I were accepted at an important job interview, I would feel very good and think that I would always be able to get a good job.
5. I think there are many wrong ways, but only one right way, to do almost anything.
6. I have found that talking about successes that I am looking forward to can keep them from happening.
7. I believe if I think terrible thoughts about someone, it can affect that person’s well-being.

Now see how your scores relate to each numbered question:

Question 1 addresses a general form of destructive thinking. If you rate yourself a 5 on this item, it suggests that you may partially create your own misfortune, allowing yourself to be overly influenced by the occurrence of one disturbing event. In general, destructive thinking involves automatically coming up with interpretations of situations that prevent you from adapting and coping with them.

Question 2 explores emotional coping, or the ability to calm yourself down by helping yourself to feel better. If you’re strong in this area, you’ve figured out ways to avoid worrying and instead to focus on the positive. By seeing situations as challenging rather than fear-provoking, you’ll be able to conquer them more effectively. A 5 on this item means you're good at self-soothing your way to success.

Question 3 conveys behavioral coping, also called “problem-focused.” This item taps your ability to get yourself through the tough times by concentrating on what must be done, building your feelings of self-confidence to give you a boost, so a 5 is a positive score. To be strong in this area, you almost have to be able to launch those action-oriented thoughts automatically.

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Question 4 demonstrates naïve optimism, the tendency to overgeneralize in a positive way from one good event to all related events in general. A 5 means that you tend to jump to conclusions too quickly, assuming that one positive outcome will guarantee all future outcomes to be positive, also.

Question 5 expresses categorical thinking, in which you view everything in black and white terms. One of the qualities of maturity is the ability to understand that what’s wrong and right (within bounds) may vary according to the situational context. Scoring 5 on this item means that you’ll have more difficulty adapting when the situation demands that you take a less extreme position.

Question 6 indicates personal superstitiousness, or the belief that your life is influenced by extraneous factors. If you scored a 5 on this item, it means that you cling to private superstitions that no one necessarily shares vs. the general superstitions (e.g. avoiding black cats) that few of us take seriously.

Question 7 emphasizes esoteric thinking, or the belief that you can magically influence outcomes through. For example, your thoughts reflect the quality of esoteric thinking. Here a 5 suggests that you hold illogical beliefs about cause and effect. If you’re high on this tendency, you may also believe in scientifically dubious phenomena, such as ghosts.

This brief version of the test can help you see where your constructive thinking strengths and weaknesses are. Maybe you didn’t realize how superstitious you were, or how quickly your mind leaps to negative interpretations of situations, causing you to be less effective in dealing with them.

According to a 2011 study by University of Granada’s Ana Santos-Ruiz and colleagues, 4 of these 7 qualities directly relate to measures of executive function, or your brain’s ability to plan and organize your behavior. Santos-Ruiz and her team found that people high in Emotional Coping, Categorical Thinking, and Esoteric Thinking scales were better able to solve problems in which they had to adapt flexibly to changing stimuli. Being high in executive function means that, like a successful corporate executive, you can best take advantage of changing circumstances and adapt accordingly.

Following from this logic, constructive thinking should also be able to assist your relationships, not just your work life or cognitive ability. By being in control of your emotions, you’ll feel happier in general, and adapt to life’s inevitable changes and challenges.

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Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2015

References:

Epstein, S. (1992). Coping ability, negative self-evaluation, and overgeneralization: Experiment and theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 826-836. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.62.5.826

Santos‐Ruiz, A., Fernandez‐Serrano, M. J., Robles‐Ortega, H., Perez‐Garcia, M., Navarrete‐Navarrete, N., & Peralta‐Ramirez, M. I. (2012). Can constructive thinking predict decision making?. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 25(5), 469-475. doi:10.1002/bdm.747