If you want to take your Emotional Intelligence to the next level, you’d want to understand the difference between integral and incidental emotions.
Integral and incidental emotions are two categories of emotional state that influence judgement, but they differ fundamentally in their origin and in how they relate to the situation at hand.
Integral emotions arise directly from the decision, task, or situation being evaluated. They are the emotions attached to the choice itself, such as the anxiety you feel about the risk in an investment decision you are about to make, or the excitement of a new job opportunity.
Incidental emotions are carryover moods from somewhere else entirely. They come from unrelated events: the obnoxious driver who cut in front of you on the way into the office, the upsetting call you took an hour earlier, or the jet lag you have not shaken off since a business trip a couple of days ago. These emotions spill into whatever you happen to be deciding even though they have nothing to do with it.
One Helps, One Misleads
Understanding the difference matters for decision-making, because both types affect how we process information.
Integral emotions serve a functional, strategic purpose. Combined with the affect heuristic, which reminds you of your urge to make snap decisions based on intuition, you can use these emotions as useful signals to slow down and deliberate on the facts, risks, and benefits. Feeling anxious about signing a risky contract, for instance, forces you to read the fine print and evaluate carefully. If you can catch yourself getting overly excited about a sale item that scrolled past in your feed, you can pause and ask, do I really need it? Integral emotions are useful information that can help you make deliberate decisions.
Incidental emotions, on the other hand, are highly susceptible to misattribution. Research has shown that someone in an incidental state of anger may unconsciously carry that aggressive appraisal into an unrelated business meeting, becoming overly critical or more risk-tolerant than the situation warrants. Recognizing that an emotion is incidental rather than integral is the primary way to keep it from skewing your judgement.
Why We Miss Our Own Moods
The challenge is that incidental emotions are hard to detect. Mood is a difficult thing to read in ourselves, in part because we are often unaware of it to begin with; we can be grumpy, nervous, tired, or even hyper, without registering that we are. It is usually only when we turn our attention to it that we become conscious of our mood. And even then it can be hard to put a finger on; it is not unusual to feel gloomy while remaining unsure of where the feeling is coming from. Mood is a deep and complex subject, the kind that can absorb you completely, and that very depth is part of why we would rather not think about it, choosing instead to brush the feeling off. The trouble is that brushing it off does not make it go away; even when we try to context switch and move on, that low-grade noise stays in the background, still pulling us down.
What to Do About It
A few simple steps can help you catch it. Before a decision that matters, pause, take a breath, and name the mood. If that is difficult (understandably so, for the reasons just covered), recall the last few events of your day and consider whether any of them are affecting your current emotional state. Then ask whether you are in the right headspace to decide, and run a quick, critical test:
If this mood or feeling were gone tomorrow, would I still make the same call?
If the honest answer is no, give yourself a short reset (a walk, a snack, a night’s sleep) and defer the decision until later. Or, if it is urgent, consult someone steadier on the day, or hand the decision to them. This, is emotional intelligence.
You can extend this emotional intelligence to others. When you sense an incidental emotion shaping someone else’s judgement, you might say, “I could be wrong, but it sounds like you are carrying some stress into this. Would you like to take a break and come back to it later?” If they would rather decide now, a gentler version of the same question helps: “If whatever happened earlier wasn’t bothering you, would you still make this call?”
A Small Discipline With a Long Reach
The aim is not to become someone who never has a bad day, but to notice when one is creeping into your ability to be a fair leader. Your team members have to carry the moody decision you made, long after the mood that shaped it has passed. Learning to notice when a feeling has wandered in from elsewhere is a small discipline with a long reach, and it is one of the quieter ways of looking after the people who depend on your judgement. Notice your incidental emotions, and let only the feelings that belong to the choice have a say.
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