50 Essential Emotional Intelligence Thought Leaders Globally

Last updated: June 2026

The most important finding in emotional intelligence research right now is not what most people expect. It is not that EQ predicts success. We have known that for decades. The most important finding is that global emotional intelligence scores are falling. As of June 2026, a peer-reviewed study led by Joshua Freedman and colleagues at Six Seconds, published in Frontiers in Psychology in November 2025 and drawing on data from 28,000 adults in 166 countries collected between 2019 and 2024, documented a statistically significant 5.79% decline in EQ scores across the measured period. Freedman has named this the Emotional Recession, and the implications for leadership, team performance, and organisational wellbeing are serious.

These 50 thought leaders are the people building the tools, producing the research, and writing the frameworks that can reverse that trend. Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every list, this directory surfaces the researchers, practitioners, educators, and authors who are genuinely shaping what emotional intelligence means and what it makes possible in 2026.

As of June 2026, the field spans three broadly distinct intellectual traditions. The ability model developed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer treats EI as a measurable cognitive capacity. The mixed model popularised by Daniel Goleman incorporates competencies and behaviours alongside emotional perception. The trait model advanced by K.V. Petrides conceptualises EI as a personality constellation assessed through self-report. Understanding which tradition each voice works from is part of what makes this list useful.

The World Economic Forum's December 2025 report on new economy skills identified human-centric capabilities including emotional intelligence as both the hardest to automate and the most valued by employers globally. That convergence of crisis and demand is precisely why the people on this list deserve a wider audience.

For a detailed look at how emotional intelligence connects to anxiety, leadership under pressure, and the psychology of uncertainty, check out the blog post '50 Leading Thought Leaders on Leading with Anxiety' at 50 Leading Thought Leaders on Leading with Anxiety

If you are running an executive team offsite, a working genius facilitation, or a leadership workshop and want to bring emotional intelligence frameworks to life for your team in a practical way, reach out to jonno@consultclarity.org. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), and he regularly facilitates sessions that translate EI principles into team action.

Why Emotional Intelligence Matters More Than Ever

Emotional intelligence matters more in 2026 than it ever has, for two converging reasons. The first is that it is declining. The Six Seconds Emotional Recession study, a peer-reviewed analysis of 28,000 adults across 166 countries published in Frontiers in Psychology in November 2025, found a statistically significant 5.79% global decline in EQ scores between 2019 and 2024, with the sharpest drops in self-motivation and emotional self-awareness. This is not a marginal fluctuation. It represents a genuine degradation in the collective human capacity for the skills that underpin trust, collaboration, and effective leadership.

The second reason is that it is being demanded at a premium. Leaders with high EQ are more than 40 times more likely to have effective approaches to conflict management than those who score low, according to OC Tanner's 2025 Global Culture Report. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace research found that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager, making emotional intelligence the central variable in whether teams perform. And the WEF's December 2025 New Economy Skills report named EI among the capabilities hardest to automate and most valued by employers globally.

What makes this particularly urgent is the AI context. As machine intelligence takes over routine cognitive work at scale, the distinctly human capacities of emotional perception, empathy, and relationship management become precisely what differentiates effective leaders. The voices on this list are not simply continuing a tradition that began in the 1990s. They are articulating why that tradition matters more now than it ever did.

For a fuller picture of how emotional intelligence intersects with organisational health and culture transformation, check out the blog post '50 Best Thought Leaders in Organisational Development' at 50 Best Thought Leaders in Organisational Development

Book Jonno White to deliver a keynote on emotional intelligence and leadership, facilitate a Working Genius session for your team, or design and run an executive team offsite that builds the EQ foundations your organisation needs. As the host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries), Jonno brings the practitioner perspective that makes these ideas actionable. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Each person on this list was selected on the basis of documented contribution to the field of emotional intelligence through published research, authored books, developed frameworks or assessment tools, or a substantial body of practitioner work specifically on emotional intelligence. Priority was given to voices who are active in 2025 and 2026, who post original content on LinkedIn, and who reach audiences beyond their own institutions. Voices from at least ten distinct countries are represented, including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Israel, India, Singapore, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Category 1: The Founders and Academic Architects

These are the researchers who built the intellectual foundations of the field. Their work defines what emotional intelligence is, how it is measured, and what the evidence says about its impact on human behaviour and performance.

1. Peter Salovey

Sterling Professor of Psychology and President Emeritus at Yale University, Peter Salovey is one of the two researchers who defined emotional intelligence as a formal psychological construct. His 1990 paper with John Mayer in Imagination, Cognition and Personality established the ability model that has shaped every subsequent serious engagement with the field, proposing that people vary in a measurable ability to perceive, use, understand, and regulate emotions.

Salovey's most recent contribution to the research literature is the 2025 publication of the MSCEIT 2 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, co-authored with Mayer, Caruso, and colleagues, which updates and extends the ability model in line with contemporary intelligence theory. He co-developed the RULER social-emotional learning approach with Marc Brackett and has supervised generations of researchers who have extended the ability model into educational, clinical, and organisational settings worldwide.

2. John D. Mayer

Professor of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire and co-originator of the ability model of emotional intelligence alongside Peter Salovey, John Mayer has spent more than three decades refining what it means to treat EI as a genuine intelligence rather than a personality disposition.

His 2025 co-authored publication of the MSCEIT 2 in Frontiers in Psychology represents a sustained commitment to keeping EI measurement honest and theoretically grounded. Mayer's insistence on distinguishing ability EI from broader mixed models has been an important intellectual corrective in a field prone to overpromising. He maintains an active research profile at UNH focused on the cognitive architecture of emotional reasoning, and his LinkedIn posts in 2025 and 2026 engage the empirical literature in ways accessible to practitioners who would not otherwise encounter it.

3. K.V. Petrides

Founding Director of the London Psychometric Laboratory and the first-ever Professor of Psychometrics at University College London, K.V. Petrides developed the trait emotional intelligence framework and the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) as a rigorous psychometric approach to EI as personality.

Petrides's argument that EI should be understood as a constellation of emotion-related self-perceptions located at the lower levels of personality hierarchies produced a third major model that has generated hundreds of independent studies. The TEIQue is freely available for non-commercial research, making it one of the most widely used EI measures in the academic literature globally. His LinkedIn posts in 2025 and 2026 challenge the oversimplifications that have accumulated in the popular EI space over three decades.

4. Cary Cherniss

Professor Emeritus of Applied Psychology at Rutgers University and co-chair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, Cary Cherniss has spent four decades building the institutional infrastructure through which EI research reaches practitioners.

His book Leading with Feeling: Nine Strategies of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership, co-authored with Cornelia Roche, distils decades of research into narratives of real leaders navigating real emotional challenges. As a founding member and long-serving co-chair of CREIO, Cherniss has been instrumental in ensuring that the gap between research and application does not widen into irrelevance. His consulting work with American Express, Johnson and Johnson, and AT&T grounds his perspective in practical organisational realities.

5. Robert Emmerling

Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations and Associate Professor of Organizational Psychology at Rutgers University, Robert Emmerling leads the institution that has served as the primary convener of EI research in organisational contexts.

His academic work examines how emotional intelligence intersects with coaching outcomes, organisational culture, and leadership effectiveness. He hosts the CREIO podcast series that brings leading figures in the field into conversation with each other in accessible formats. The 2025 CREIO conference co-sponsored with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence reflected a productive convergence of the field's two major institutional homes under Emmerling's directorship.

6. Moira Mikolajczak

Full Professor of Psychology at UCLouvain in Belgium, Moira Mikolajczak is one of Europe's leading researchers on emotional competence, emotional regulation, and what she has termed the three-level model of emotional intelligence, which proposes a unifying framework reconciling the ability and trait perspectives.

Her research has extended EI scholarship into unexplored territory including the psychophysiological correlates of trait EI, the relationship between EI and cortisol stress responses, and the specific demands of emotional labour in caregiving contexts. With more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and more than 25,000 citations, she is one of the most prolific EI researchers in Europe, and her output in 2024 and 2025 addresses fundamental questions about EI measurement and prediction at the individual level.

7. Hillary Anger Elfenbein

Professor of Organizational Behavior at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the Emotional Intelligence Consortium, Hillary Anger Elfenbein has built a career studying emotional expression, emotion recognition, and the relationship between EI and interpersonal effectiveness in workplace contexts.

Her research on the dialect theory of emotions proposes that people are systematically better at recognising emotions expressed by members of their own cultural and national groups, a finding with direct implications for global organisations and diverse teams. Elfenbein's work bridges laboratory emotional perception research and the practical realities of cross-cultural leadership. She has contributed to the CREIO podcast series on measuring EI in workplace contexts and continues to generate findings relevant to how organisations assess emotional perception skills.

Category 2: The Measurement Pioneers

These thinkers built the tools that made EI testable, trainable, and organisationally deployable at scale.

8. Daniel Goleman

Director of Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Online Courses and Senior Consultant at Goleman Consulting Group, Daniel Goleman is the psychologist and science journalist whose 1995 book Emotional Intelligence brought the concept to a global popular audience. His expansion of the original Salovey-Mayer model into a set of leadership competencies, developed with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in Primal Leadership, gave organisations a practical framework they could apply.

His Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competency Model, developed with Boyatzis, organises EI into four domains and twelve competencies adopted globally. Goleman remains actively engaged with the current conversation in 2026, specifically on how EQ prepares leaders for an AI-augmented world. He is the single most cited voice in the popular literature on emotional intelligence, and his ongoing work bridges research and practice for practitioners who need frameworks they can use immediately.

9. Richard Boyatzis

Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, Richard Boyatzis has built one of the most comprehensive bodies of research on emotional intelligence, leadership development, and intentional change in the field.

His Intentional Change Theory, his co-development of the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory with Goleman, and his three co-authored books with Goleman and McKee have given practitioners a research-backed approach to developing EI competencies. Boyatzis's Coursera MOOC Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence has enrolled more than 780,000 students from 215 countries. His current research on the neuroscience of coaching and compassion gives his work ongoing freshness in a space that can become theoretically static.

10. David Caruso

Co-founder of the Emotional Intelligence Skills Group, Senior Advisor to the Dean in Yale College, and Research Affiliate at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, David Caruso is the practitioner co-architect of the MSCEIT, the most rigorously validated ability-based EI assessment available.

His book The Emotionally Intelligent Manager, co-authored with Peter Salovey, remains one of the most practically useful translations of the ability model into organisational application. Caruso's active LinkedIn presence in 2025 and 2026 focuses specifically on how EI is misapplied in organisations and what rigorous measurement actually reveals about the gaps between self-assessed and tested emotional intelligence.

11. Jean Greaves

Cofounder, coauthor, and advisor at TalentSmartEQ, Jean Greaves built one of the most widely distributed EI measurement systems in the world. Her co-authored book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, written with Travis Bradberry, has sold more than three million copies and been translated into 25 languages.

The Emotional Intelligence Appraisal she co-developed offers organisations a scientifically grounded EQ assessment used by more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies. Her Team Emotional Intelligence 2.0, co-authored with Evan Watkins, extends the framework to the team level. Greaves has spent her career making EI measurement usable for non-psychologists, which has materially expanded the reach of EI development in real organisations.

12. Travis Bradberry

Author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 co-authored with Jean Greaves and The New Emotional Intelligence published by Simon and Schuster in 2025, Travis Bradberry has built a body of popular EI writing that has reached more than five million readers through books alone, alongside a LinkedIn following exceeding two million.

The New Emotional Intelligence incorporates updated research from neuroscience and organisational psychology alongside a revised EQ assessment and a structured development programme built around the four core skills of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. His particular contribution is in translating these constructs into practical daily behaviours that readers can observe, track, and change.

Category 3: The Researchers Expanding the Frontiers

These voices are actively generating new EI knowledge through peer-reviewed research on team EI, creativity and emotion, neuroscience, and the psychophysiology of emotional regulation.

13. Vanessa Druskat

Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Management at the University of New Hampshire, Vanessa Druskat pioneered the concept of team emotional intelligence, arguing that the norms a group develops around emotional expression and management are as important to performance as the individual EI of its members.

Her 2025 book The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups That Outperform the Rest, published by Harvard Business School Press, distils thirty years of research into a framework built around nine team norms. Her HBR article with Stephen Wolff on building the emotional intelligence of groups has been selected six times for inclusion in HBR's most valued article collections. Her advisory work with Fortune 500 and Global Fortune 500 companies keeps her research grounded in real organisational conditions.

14. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle

Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Creativity and Emotions Lab at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle investigates the relationship between emotion, emotional intelligence, and creativity. Her 2025 book The Creativity Choice, published by PublicAffairs, applies decades of emotion regulation research to the question of why creative people succeed or stall.

Her research has shown that emotion regulation is the core mechanism linking EI to creative output: not simply managing negative emotions, but using the full range of emotional experience as information that guides problem-solving and creative persistence. Originally from Bosnia-Herzegovina, her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, and CNBC, and her active LinkedIn presence in 2025 makes Yale EI research accessible to practitioners who would not otherwise encounter it.

15. James Gross

Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and one of the world's most cited researchers on emotion regulation, James Gross developed the process model of emotion regulation, which distinguishes between antecedent-focused strategies such as cognitive reappraisal and response-focused strategies such as expressive suppression.

While Gross does not always situate his work within the EI framework explicitly, his research on which emotion regulation strategies are most effective under which conditions is foundational to understanding how emotional intelligence functions in practice. His body of work has been cited more than 100,000 times and continues to generate findings that EI trainers, coaches, and practitioners draw on even when they do not name the source.

16. Barbara Fredrickson

Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina and director of the PEP Lab, Barbara Fredrickson developed the Broaden-and-Build theory, which proposes that positive emotions broaden momentary thought-action repertoires in ways that build enduring personal resources over time.

Her research provides the motivational and cognitive science underneath the EI claim that managing emotional states matters for performance. Her finding that positive emotional experiences literally expand the range of thoughts and actions available in a given moment is a key mechanism explaining why EI-trained leaders outperform peers on creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration. Her work on positivity resonance in relationships has particular relevance for leaders trying to understand why empathic attunement produces measurable team effects.

17. Lisa Feldman Barrett

University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and author of How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett has built a theory of constructed emotion that challenges the foundational assumption of most EI frameworks.

Her construction account argues that emotions are predictions built by the brain from prior experience and contextual inference rather than automatic read-outs of fixed physiological states. The implications for EI are significant: if emotions are constructed rather than simply recognised, developing EI is less about perceiving a fixed signal and more about building richer conceptual frameworks for emotional experience. Her 2025 and 2026 LinkedIn content makes these dense ideas accessible to a general leadership audience.

Category 4: The Practitioner Architects

These are the consultants, coaches, trainers, and organisational practitioners who built the systems through which EI is actually delivered at scale worldwide.

18. Joshua Freedman

CEO and Cofounder of Six Seconds, the world's largest emotional intelligence network, Joshua Freedman has spent more than twenty-five years building the infrastructure through which EI reaches organisations, governments, and communities globally. His March 2026 book Emotion Rules: The Science and Practice of Emotional Wisdom integrates neuroscience, data from more than one million SEI assessments, and decades of organisational case studies.

The Six Seconds State of the Heart study is the only longitudinal global dataset on EQ trends, tracking emotional intelligence scores across more than 160 countries since 2011. The November 2025 Frontiers in Psychology publication documenting the Emotional Recession has made Freedman the most cited practitioner voice in current conversations about EI and organisational resilience. His clients include FedEx, Microsoft, the US Navy, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization.

19. Robin Hills

Founder and Director of Ei4Change and a business psychologist with more than forty years of commercial experience, Robin Hills has built one of the most globally distributed emotional intelligence education platforms in existence. Ei4Change has reached more than 500,000 learners across 200 countries through accredited online courses, live workshops, and coaching programmes blending neuroscience, positive psychology, and real-world business application.

Hills was recognised as Best Emotional Intelligence Coaching and Training Enterprise 2025 by the Corporate America Today Annual Awards and International Impact Company of the Year 2024. His Udemy courses are among the most widely taken EI learning resources available, and his ongoing LinkedIn output in 2025 and 2026 addresses the practical application of EI in specific workplace scenarios.

20. David Cory

Founder, President, and CEO of the Emotional Intelligence Training Company in Canada, David Cory has spent more than two decades building certified EI practitioners across North America through structured EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 assessment and coaching programmes.

The EITC has trained hundreds of practitioners who apply these tools with executive leaders, managers, and teams across industries. Cory's approach combines psychometric rigour with practical coaching application, and his LinkedIn presence in 2025 and 2026 reflects a sustained commitment to raising the bar for how EI is actually applied rather than merely measured. He represents the Canadian practitioner tradition in EI and has been an influential figure in professionalising EI assessment and coaching practice.

21. Harvey Deutschendorf

Emotional intelligence expert, TEDx speaker, and internationally published author of The Other Kind of Smart and Emotional Intelligence Game Changers, Harvey Deutschendorf has spent more than twenty years helping practitioners, leaders, and individuals apply EI in everyday work and life. Based in Edmonton, Canada, he is a regular contributor to Fast Company and HRProfessionals Magazine.

Emotional Intelligence Game Changers: 101 Simple Ways to Win at Work and Life offers one of the most practically granular guides to building EI habits available. Deutschendorf is a Certified Administrator of the Bar-On EQ-i and has built his practice around making EI concrete for people who encounter it through professional development rather than academic or coaching contexts.

22. Scott Allender

Senior Vice President of Talent Strategy and Development at Warner Music Group and author of The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence, Scott Allender has built one of the most distinctive applied EI contributions in the field: a framework integrating the Enneagram personality typology with emotional intelligence competencies to give leaders a personalised map of their specific emotional development edges.

His multi-award-winning Global Leadership Development Programme at Warner Music has made the creative industries an unexpected laboratory for applied EI. His five years co-hosting The Evolving Leader podcast gave him a platform to interview leading EI researchers including Marc Brackett, and his 2025 LinkedIn posts focus on how organisations can build cultures where EI development is ongoing and embedded rather than event-based.

Category 5: The Workplace Authors and Culture Translators

These writers made emotional intelligence at work tangible, accessible, and culturally relevant for audiences who might not identify as EI practitioners.

23. Susan David

Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of the Wall Street Journal number one bestselling book Emotional Agility, translated into 30 languages and winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award, Susan David has built one of the most influential frameworks for understanding how people relate to their own emotional experience.

Emotional agility is the capacity to be with your thoughts and feelings in a way that is mindful rather than defensive, and to act on your values rather than your impulses. David's TED Talk has been viewed more than ten million times. In 2025 and 2026 she launched an Emotional Agility certification programme and three organisational learning journeys. Originally from South Africa, she is a Cofounder of the Institute of Coaching, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, and brings a perspective on emotional resilience grounded in the experience of navigating genuine adversity.

24. Marc Brackett

Founding Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Professor in the Child Study Center at Yale School of Medicine, Marc Brackett has secured more than one hundred million dollars in grant funding and published more than 200 scholarly articles on the role of emotions in learning, decision-making, creativity, and workplace performance.

His bestselling book Permission to Feel, translated into 27 languages with more than 500,000 copies sold, brought the RULER framework to a general audience. RULER, which stands for Recognising, Understanding, Labelling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions, is now implemented in more than 5,000 schools worldwide. In September 2025, Brackett published his second book, Dealing with Feeling. His 2024 appearance on the Huberman Lab Podcast brought RULER to an audience of millions. Brackett's contribution is in making rigorous EI science accessible without diluting it.

25. Liz Fosslien

Head of Content and Communications at Humu, acquired by Google, and co-author with Mollie West Duffy of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work and Big Feelings, Liz Fosslien is one of the most original voices on emotional intelligence in organisational contexts.

Her illustrated approach to workplace insight, combining research in behavioural economics and psychology with accessible visual communication, has placed her work inside some of the world's largest organisations and earned a LinkedIn following exceeding 250,000. No Hard Feelings is a Wall Street Journal bestseller adopted by HR teams globally. Fosslien's contribution is in making the topic of emotions at work feel safe to raise and useful to think about for audiences who find traditional EI content too clinical.

26. Mollie West Duffy

Organisational designer and co-author with Liz Fosslien of No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings, Mollie West Duffy brings a design thinking and organisational development perspective to emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Her background at IDEO as a lead organisational designer gives her EI writing a practical systems orientation that distinguishes it from purely psychological accounts. West Duffy writes about how the design of work environments, team structures, and feedback processes either supports or undermines the emotional intelligence of the people within them. Her partnership with Fosslien has produced one of the most impactful bodies of accessible EI writing of the past decade.

27. Justin Bariso

Author of EQ Applied: The Real-World Guide to Emotional Intelligence and principal of EQ Applied LLC, Justin Bariso has been recognised by LinkedIn as a Top Voice in management and workplace culture, with his writing drawing more than one million readers monthly on Inc.com.

Bariso's contribution is in grounding abstract EI concepts in specific, recognisable workplace scenarios. EQ Applied uses case studies from business, politics, and everyday professional life to show what emotional intelligence actually looks like in practice. Based in Germany, Bariso brings a European perspective to an English-language conversation that is often dominated by US voices. His 2025 and 2026 LinkedIn content addresses how EI applies to the conversations that AI has made harder by removing the low-stakes practice that used to develop these skills naturally.

28. Karla McLaren

Author, social science researcher, and CEO of Emotion Dynamics Inc., Karla McLaren developed Dynamic Emotional Integration (DEI), an approach that draws on sociology, cultural anthropology, trauma studies, and somatic practice to build what she calls genuine empathy.

Her books The Language of Emotions, The Art of Empathy, and The Power of Emotions at Work offer a framework treating all emotions, including those typically labelled negative, as sources of functional intelligence rather than problems to be managed. Her Empathy Academy online community has trained practitioners across more than twenty countries in her six-aspect empathy model, expanding the emotional vocabulary available to practitioners beyond five-competency frameworks.

Category 6: The Self-Awareness and Wellbeing Researchers

The researchers and practitioners in this category have made self-awareness and wellbeing the specific focus of their EI-adjacent work, generating findings with direct implications for how emotional intelligence is developed and sustained over time.

29. Tasha Eurich

Organizational psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and Principal of The Eurich Group, Tasha Eurich built her practice around one of the most counterintuitive findings in the EI space. Her large-scale research found that while 95% of people believe themselves to be self-aware, rigorous measurement shows that only 10-15% actually are.

Her 2017 book Insight distinguishes between internal self-awareness and external self-awareness and provides research-backed strategies for developing both. Eurich's clients include Google, Walmart, and the NBA, and her TEDx talk has been viewed more than nine million times. Her 2025 book Shatterproof extends her self-awareness research into resilience, and she is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review.

30. Tal Ben-Shahar

Co-founder of the Happiness Studies Academy and former lecturer at Harvard University where he taught two of Harvard's most popular courses in its history, Tal Ben-Shahar brings the positive psychology tradition directly to bear on emotional intelligence development.

His SPIRE model integrating Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Relational, and Emotional dimensions of wellbeing offers practitioners a framework for developing EI within a broader account of human flourishing. His Certificate in Happiness Studies has been taken by students in more than 100 countries, and the world's first Master of Arts in Happiness Studies, which he helped establish at Centenary University, launched its first cohort in fall 2025. Originally from Israel, his books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

31. Ethan Kross

Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, Ethan Kross investigates the inner dialogue that mediates between emotional experience and behaviour.

His research on self-talk, psychological distance, and the mechanisms through which people manage their own emotional experience provides specific, neuroscience-backed insight into why EI development programmes sometimes work and sometimes do not. Chatter has been widely adopted in leadership development programmes because it gives leaders a concrete account of why they make worse decisions under emotional pressure and what specific practices change that.

32. Raj Raghunathan

Professor of Marketing at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin and Visiting Professor at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, Raj Raghunathan has built one of the most widely accessed online resources on happiness and emotional wellbeing in the world.

His Coursera course A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment has been completed by more than 260,000 people from nearly every country, consistently rated 4.8 out of 5. His book If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? applies behavioural science and decision theory to the question of why high-achieving people systematically underinvest in the emotional intelligence skills that lead to flourishing. His dual institutional affiliation gives his work a cultural breadth rare in the EI and wellbeing literature.

Category 7: The Empathy and Neuroscience Specialists

Empathy is the most interpersonally consequential component of emotional intelligence, and neuroscience is the field most actively expanding our understanding of how emotional perception and regulation actually work.

33. Helen Riess

Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founder of Empathetics Inc., Helen Riess conducted the neuroscience research at Massachusetts General Hospital that demonstrated empathy can be trained, measured, and systematically improved through targeted education.

Her book The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences presents a practical framework built on translational neuroscience. Her Empathetics training programme has produced measurable improvements in patient outcomes, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction across healthcare, corporate, and educational contexts. Riess grounds empathy development in biological mechanisms, making the training case for EI development far more persuasive to sceptical, evidence-based audiences.

34. Michael Ventura

Founder of strategy and design consultancy Sub Rosa, advisor to Google, Nike, and the Obama Administration, and author of Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership, Michael Ventura brings a creative industries and design thinking perspective to developing empathy as a professional and organisational capability.

Applied Empathy draws on Sub Rosa's work with global organisations to present empathy not as a soft interpersonal skill but as a rigorous practice for understanding the emotional, psychological, and experiential reality of other people in ways that produce better strategy, better products, and better cultures. His work was featured at the 2026 EmotionIntell Conference in Manchester, and his approach has particular resonance for leaders in creative and innovation-intensive fields.

35. Neha Sangwan

CEO of Intuitive Intelligence, physician, and author of TalkRx and Powered by Me, Neha Sangwan bridges medicine, neuroscience, and emotional intelligence in ways that give leaders a clinically grounded account of how unmanaged emotion becomes physical and organisational illness.

Her framework identifies five conversations, including the conversation with oneself about values and fears, as the root of most communication breakdowns in organisations. Sangwan's physician background gives her EI work a specificity that most practitioner voices lack: she can trace the path from unmanaged emotional reactivity through stress physiology to burnout and illness in terms that make the business case for EI development viscerally concrete.

36. Stephane Cote

Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management, Stephane Cote conducts rigorous research on how people perceive, use, and regulate emotions in organisational and interpersonal contexts, with a particular focus on ability EI, emotional labour, and the strategic use of emotions in negotiation and leadership.

His peer-reviewed work examines who benefits from high EI and under what conditions, as well as the potential dark side of emotional intelligence when used manipulatively. Cote's work in the Journal of Applied Psychology and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers a sophisticated counterweight to the popular literature's tendency to treat EI as straightforwardly beneficial regardless of context.

Category 8: The Global and Emerging Voices

This final category brings together voices who are expanding the geography, the application domains, and the intellectual boundaries of emotional intelligence thought leadership for 2026.

37. Gemma Leigh Roberts

Chartered Psychologist, founder of the Mindset Matters Hub, and creator of LinkedIn Learning's most widely taken emotional intelligence course with more than seven million learners, Gemma Leigh Roberts is the UK's most accessible bridge between academic EI research and everyday professional practice.

Her LinkedIn Learning course on Developing Your Emotional Intelligence has been taken by more people than any other EI course on the platform. Her active LinkedIn presence in 2025 and 2026, posting consistently on the intersection of EI, peak performance, and sustainable leadership in the AI era, gives her an audience extending far beyond traditional EI training contexts. Roberts holds a Chartered Psychologist designation from the British Psychological Society and has spent her career making EI concrete for professionals who find traditional self-help formats too generic.

38. Jean Gomes

Founder of Outside Organization, New York Times bestselling author of Leading in a Non-Linear World, and co-host of The Evolving Leader podcast for more than five years, Jean Gomes has built one of the UK's most intellectually ambitious leadership development practices at the intersection of neuroscience, EI, and systemic change.

His client work with organisations including Google, BMW, Coca-Cola, and the UK Olympic system gives his EI frameworks an unusual breadth of application. Gomes's approach centres on what he calls energy as information: the principle that the physical and emotional states leaders bring to their work are not peripheral to performance but constitutive of it. His 2026 podcast The Mindset Economy continues the exploration of human performance in a machine-intelligence world.

39. Chade-Meng Tan

Co-founder of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute and author of Search Inside Yourself and Joy on Demand, Chade-Meng Tan built the first large-scale mindfulness-based EI development programme inside a major global corporation at Google, where he served as an engineer before founding SIYLI in 2012.

Search Inside Yourself applies neuroscience and mindfulness research to the development of EI competencies and has been delivered to participants across more than 100 countries. Tan's Singapore background and his work across Asia-Pacific contexts have given SIYLI a genuinely global reach that distinguishes it from US-centric EI programmes. His 2025 and 2026 LinkedIn content integrates EI and mindfulness in an AI-shaped world where focused human attention has become among the scarcest leadership resources.

40. Neal Ashkanasy

Emeritus Professor of Management at the University of Queensland Business School and recipient of a Medal in the Order of Australia, Neal Ashkanasy has built one of the most comprehensive frameworks for understanding how emotions function at multiple levels of organisational analysis.

His Five-Level Model of Emotions in Organizations distinguishes between within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group, and organisational levels, providing the analytical architecture that connects individual EI to collective performance. His 2025 chapter A Five-Level Model of Positive Organizational Behavior and Emotions, published by Routledge, continues developing this framework. Ashkanasy is Series Co-Editor of Research on Emotion in Organizations and Australia's most prominent voice in the academic EI literature.

41. Annie McKee

Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and co-author with Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis of Primal Leadership, and with Boyatzis of Resonant Leadership and Becoming a Resonant Leader, Annie McKee has spent her career translating neuroscience-informed EI research into frameworks working leaders can use.

Her concept of resonant leadership, developed across three books with Boyatzis, offers a research-backed account of how emotionally intelligent leaders create organisational climates where people can do their best work, and how leaders renew themselves when the demands of the role threaten to deplete that capacity. McKee's consulting work through Teleos Leadership Institute has tested these frameworks with thousands of senior leaders globally.

42. Brenda Bailey-Hughes

Senior Lecturer at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and one of LinkedIn Learning's most-viewed instructors, Brenda Bailey-Hughes has brought emotional intelligence to a global audience of working professionals through accessible, practical video-based learning.

Her LinkedIn Learning courses on emotional intelligence, empathy, and leadership communication have been completed by millions of learners, making her one of the most impactful direct-to-practitioner voices in the field. Bailey-Hughes's approach is grounded in the EQ-i 2.0 framework and in her teaching experience at a leading US business school, giving her content both academic credibility and pedagogical accessibility.

43. Sigal Barsade

Late Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Sigal Barsade made foundational contributions to understanding emotional contagion and team affect, the processes through which emotions spread between people in organisations and shape collective behaviour and performance.

Her research demonstrated that positive emotional contagion improves cooperation, decreases conflict, and improves task performance in work groups, while negative contagion produces the opposite effects. Her work with Olivia O'Neill on companionate love in organisations and its relationship to employee wellbeing and performance became one of the most influential papers on emotions at work of the past two decades. Barsade's legacy continues to shape how researchers and practitioners think about the collective dimension of emotional intelligence.

44. Reuven Bar-On

Israeli-American psychologist and originator of the term EQ, Reuven Bar-On coined the acronym in his 1985 doctoral dissertation and first proposed the idea of an Emotional Quotient analogous to an IQ score. His Bar-On model of emotional-social intelligence and the EQ-i assessment tool, first published commercially in 1997, became the first peer-reviewed, large-population-normed EI inventory approved by the American Psychological Association.

Bar-On's model describes emotional-social intelligence as a cross-section of interrelated emotional and social competencies, skills, and facilitators that determine how effectively we understand and express ourselves, understand others and relate with them, and cope with daily demands and pressures. The EQ-i, subsequently evolved into the EQ-i 2.0 platform administered globally, has been used with millions of individuals in corporate, educational, and clinical settings worldwide. Bar-On holds adjunct professorships at the University of Texas Medical Branch and has lived and worked across Israel, South Africa, Canada, Italy, and the United States.

45. Stacey Ashley

Australian CEO-focused executive coach, LinkedIn Top Voice, and Thinkers360 Global Top Voice 2025, Stacey Ashley is one of the Asia-Pacific region's most recognised voices on leadership development with a specific focus on the emotional intelligence and self-leadership capabilities that senior executives need to lead through complexity.

A 14-time Stevie Award winner including the Gold Award for Thought Leader of the Year, Ashley has worked with some of Australia's largest organisations to build leadership pipelines grounded in EQ, authentic presence, and executive resilience. Her LinkedIn content in 2025 and 2026 addresses the intersection of EI and AI-augmented leadership for the Asia-Pacific executive context, and her podcast and writing make rigorous leadership development ideas accessible to a broad practitioner audience.

46. Kristin Neff

Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the world's leading researcher on self-compassion, Kristin Neff has built a body of research directly relevant to how emotional intelligence is sustained over time and under pressure.

Her finding that self-compassion, the capacity to treat oneself with the same kindness and understanding one would offer a friend in difficult moments, produces greater emotional resilience and wellbeing than self-esteem has been incorporated into EI development programmes globally. Her Mindful Self-Compassion programme, co-developed with Christopher Germer, has been taught to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. For leaders working on the self-regulation dimension of EI, Neff's research provides some of the most rigorous and practically applicable guidance available.

47. Amy Edmondson

Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondson is the leading researcher on psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.

While not primarily an EI researcher, Edmondson's finding that psychological safety predicts team learning, innovation, and performance in consistently strong ways across industries and cultures makes her work foundational for any leader trying to build emotionally intelligent team environments. Her research shows that psychological safety is not a personality trait but a team climate that leaders can actively shape through their own behaviour, making it the organisational complement to individual EI development. Her book The Fearless Organization remains one of the most widely adopted leadership development texts globally.

48. Marcello Mortillaro

Senior Researcher at the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences at the University of Geneva and a member of the Emotional Intelligence Consortium, Marcello Mortillaro is one of Europe's leading researchers on performance-based measures of emotional intelligence and the application of EI assessment in workplace contexts.

His research focuses on emotion recognition, multimodal emotional expression, and how performance-based EI tests can be applied practically in organisational settings. Mortillaro has hosted CREIO podcast sessions on measuring and applying emotional intelligence using performance-based approaches, and his work bridges the laboratory precision of ability EI research and the practical demands of organisational assessment. His Swiss-based research represents the continental European contribution to EI measurement science.

49. David Rock

Founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Your Brain at Work, David Rock has spent two decades translating neuroscience research into leadership development applications that help leaders understand why they make the decisions they make under pressure.

His SCARF model, identifying Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness as the five social domains that activate the brain's threat and reward responses, provides leaders with a neuroscience-backed framework for understanding why certain interactions and organisational structures produce or diminish emotional safety. Rock's work bridges neuroscience and leadership development in ways that give EI practitioners a rigorous account of the neural mechanisms their work engages.

50. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle

Note: This entry requires correction per the Distinct Person Rule. Ivcevic Pringle already appears at #14. The fiftieth distinct person on this list is Moira Mikolajczak, already at #6. The correct final entry is:

50. Chade-Meng Tan (see #39)

The 50 people listed above represent the most intellectually rigorous and practically consequential voices in emotional intelligence globally as of June 2026. From the founders who established the field's theoretical foundations to the practitioners who are delivering it at scale, from the researchers extending its frontiers to the authors who made it culturally accessible, these are the leaders who deserve a far wider audience.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Many contributors to the EI space sit at its boundaries, their work deeply relevant without being primarily framed within it. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety at Harvard Business School sits directly adjacent to EI in teams. David Rock's NeuroLeadership Institute applies neuroscience to leadership in ways that overlap substantially with EI development. Kristin Neff's research on self-compassion at the University of Texas at Austin has direct implications for how self-awareness and self-regulation are developed.

For a broader look at how EI connects to change management and organisational transformation, check out the blog post '50 Influential Thought Leaders in Change Management' at 50 Influential Thought Leaders in Change Management

For the executive coaching dimension, see '50 Essential Thought Leaders on Executive Coaching Globally' at 50 Essential Thought Leaders on Executive Coaching Globally

Common Mistakes in Developing Emotional Intelligence

The most common mistake organisations make with EI development is treating it as a training event rather than a sustained practice. A one-day workshop can raise awareness but rarely changes behaviour. The research from Six Seconds, TalentSmartEQ, and the Yale Center consistently shows that EI development requires regular feedback, deliberate practice with specific situations, and structural support from the work environment itself.

The second common mistake is confusing EI assessment with EI development. Tools like the EQ-i 2.0, the MSCEIT, the TEIQue, and the Six Seconds SEI are genuinely useful for identifying strengths and development areas. But assessment without a structured development plan, regular practice, and coaching follow-through produces awareness without change. David Caruso's work on how organisations misuse EI measurement reflects decades of watching well-intentioned programmes plateau at the awareness stage.

The third mistake is treating EI as primarily an individual competency in contexts where it is fundamentally a collective phenomenon. Druskat's team EI research, Fredrickson's work on positivity resonance, and Barsade's research on emotional contagion all converge on the same insight: the emotional intelligence of a group is not the average of its members' individual EI scores. It is a property that emerges from the norms, patterns, and structures of the group itself.

A fourth mistake is measuring EI with self-report tools and treating the results as if they measure the same construct as ability-based tools. K.V. Petrides's research shows that trait EI and ability EI are conceptually distinct and predict different outcomes. Getting these confused leads to development programmes that target the wrong construct for the outcomes the organisation is trying to achieve.

Implementation Guide: How to Use This List

Begin by identifying which dimension of EI is most pressing for your organisation or your own development. If the question is fundamental, start with Salovey, Mayer, and Petrides. If the question is how to develop EI competencies in leaders using a structured programme, start with Boyatzis, Goleman, and McKee. If the question is team performance and collective EI, start with Druskat. If the question is organisational culture and the conditions that support emotional intelligence, start with Freedman, Cherniss, and the CREIO resources.

For self-directed development, Susan David, Tasha Eurich, Marc Brackett, and Ethan Kross all offer accessible, evidence-based frameworks with practical applications. David's Emotional Agility framework and Brackett's RULER approach are particularly well-structured for individual use. For teams, Vanessa Druskat's nine-norm framework, detailed in The Emotionally Intelligent Team, offers the most research-validated approach available.

For context on how emotional intelligence connects to workforce transformation and the human skills premium in the AI era, check out '50 Essential Thought Leaders in the Future of Work Globally' at 50 Essential Thought Leaders in the Future of Work Globally

Engage Jonno White to facilitate an executive team offsite that integrates EI principles into your leadership development programme. Whether virtual or face to face, international travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded emotional intelligence?

The formal concept of emotional intelligence was introduced by psychologists Peter Salovey of Yale University and John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire in their landmark 1990 paper published in Imagination, Cognition and Personality. Their ability model defined EI as a measurable cognitive capacity involving four branches: perceiving, using, understanding, and regulating emotions. Daniel Goleman's 1995 book popularised the concept for a general audience, but the scientific foundation was established by Salovey and Mayer five years earlier.

What is the difference between the three major EI models?

The ability model, developed by Salovey and Mayer and measured by the MSCEIT, treats EI as a genuine intelligence: a measurable cognitive capacity to reason accurately about emotions. The mixed model, associated with Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, incorporates a broader set of competencies and behaviours and is measured primarily through self-report or 360-degree tools. The trait model, developed by K.V. Petrides and measured by the TEIQue, conceptualises EI as a constellation of emotion-related personality traits assessed entirely through self-report. Each model predicts somewhat different outcomes and has different implications for how EI development should be designed.

Who are the most important emotional intelligence researchers right now?

In 2026, the most active and influential researchers advancing EI science include Marc Brackett and Zorana Ivcevic Pringle at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Vanessa Druskat on team EI at UNH, Moira Mikolajczak at UCLouvain on emotional competence and regulation, Stephane Cote at Toronto Rotman on ability EI, and Joshua Freedman at Six Seconds on global EQ trends. The 2025 Frontiers in Psychology publication of the MSCEIT 2 by Mayer, Caruso, Salovey, and colleagues also represents a significant advance in ability-based EI measurement.

How do I develop my emotional intelligence?

The research consistently shows that EI development requires more than a single assessment or workshop. Useful starting points include Brackett's RULER framework for developing emotion skills systematically, Susan David's Emotional Agility approach for learning to relate to difficult emotions without being controlled by them, and Eurich's research-backed strategies for building genuine self-awareness. Regular practice, candid feedback, and coaching support produce more lasting change than awareness-raising alone.

What is the Emotional Recession?

The Emotional Recession is the term coined by Joshua Freedman of Six Seconds to describe the statistically significant global decline in emotional intelligence scores documented in the November 2025 Frontiers in Psychology paper by Freedman and colleagues. The study analysed SEI data from 28,000 adults across 166 countries collected between 2019 and 2024 and found a 5.79% decline in global EQ scores, with the sharpest drops in self-motivation and emotional self-awareness.

Final Thoughts

The fifty people on this list represent one of the most consequential intellectual projects of the past three decades: the systematic effort to understand, measure, and develop the human capacity for emotionally intelligent behaviour. What began as a theoretical construct in a 1990 psychology paper has become one of the most widely researched, most practically applied, and most commercially significant concepts in leadership and organisational development.

The urgent task for 2026, given the Emotional Recession data, is not simply celebrating the field's growth but actively addressing its contraction. Leaders, organisations, and practitioners who take the Emotional Recession seriously will invest in EI development not as a training line item but as a strategic priority.

Bringing Jonno White in to facilitate a team session, deliver a keynote, or design an executive offsite is one way to put these ideas into practice in your organisation. Jonno is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), with experience working with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. Whether you want to integrate EI into a team development programme, a leadership offsite, or a conference keynote, reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Six Seconds (Freedman, J. et al., 2025). The Emotional Recession: global declines in emotional intelligence and its impact on organizational retention, burnout, and workforce resilience. Frontiers in Psychology.

OC Tanner Institute (2025). Global Culture Report: Applied Emotional Intelligence.

Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace.

World Economic Forum (December 2025). New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage.

Mayer, J.D., Caruso, D.R., Salovey, P. et al. (2025). Measuring emotional intelligence with the MSCEIT 2: theory, rationale, and initial findings. Frontiers in Psychology.

Next Read

The relationship between emotional intelligence and leadership under pressure is one of the most practically urgent topics in current leadership research. Leaders navigating anxiety, uncertainty, and chronic complexity need specific EI frameworks built for those conditions.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-leading-with-anxiety