Sensitive but not sentimental: Emotionally intelligent people can put their emotions aside when necessary

Are emotionally intelligent people sentimental? Does their greater sensitivity handicap them or are they able, as theory would expect, to experience and regulate emotions flexibly, depending on their goals? We examined this issue in organizational settings. Good managers are indeed expected to be both attuned to feelings (theirs as well as their subordinates’) and able to put them aside when needed to take tough (but necessary) decisions. Our results show that emotionally intelligent managers do make better managers, as reflected by greater managerial competencies, higher team efficiency and less stressed subordinates. Moreover, and most importantly, emotionally intelligent managers are not just nicer managers. As our results show, emotional intelligence has nothing to do with sentimentality. Actually, it is managers with low EI who have the greatest difficulties to put their emotions aside and not let them interfere when inappropriate.     

‘With Love from Band Aid’: Sentimental exchange,affective economies,and popular globalism

This paper discusses affective attachments to popular global imaginaries by examining the place of love in the popular humanitarianism associated with the 1984–85 music charity events Band Aid and Live Aid.The paper offers a materialist reading of the charity spectacles that situates them within a popular culture of sentimentality engaged in making and imagining forms of global community through social practices of exchange. It draws on the feminist scholarship on sentimental cultures and their imbrication with social reform movements and commodity capitalism to show how Band Aid can be understood as part of a popular culture of sentimental exchange, in which famine relief images, stories, tears, money and goods were passed along in affective exchanges that also involved sentimental stories and personalized commodities and capital such as wedding rings, household furniture and allowances. The circulation of feeling, concretized in the exchange of goods and money, confirmed the social fantasy of global community, imagined through the terms of intimate love and familial gift exchange. When combined with local, national and international commodity markets that allowed information, goods and images to travel among strangers, global gift giving appeared to replace geopolitical alliances and financial interests with an open, barrier-free, affective economy of love and cooperation.