Emotional Quotient cover
The Vitruvian Quotient

Emotional Quotient

From Phineas Gage to the EQ-i 2.0
Imran Stanton Cooper
Working title.
View The Vitruvian Quotient
The Pitch

Goleman extended one slice of Gardner's framework and the EQ idea took the world. This is what came next: the actual psychometric instrument, the limbic neuroscience, and what EQ looks like as one of eight rather than the IQ-replacement.

Synopsis

Phineas Gage took an iron tamping rod through his prefrontal cortex in 1848. His intelligence was intact. His EQ was destroyed. The case is the founding evidence for emotional intelligence as a discrete cognitive achievement, and it is where Cooper's EQ volume begins.

The book pulls on Daniel Goleman's 1995 trade work, Reuven Bar-On's 1997 EQ-i (the first validated psychometric measure of emotional intelligence), Mayer-Salovey-Caruso's MSCEIT, and the limbic-prefrontal regulatory neuroscience that has matured since. Cooper's frame closes the loop Goleman opened: rather than treating EQ as an IQ replacement, the VQ framework places it as one of eight, which lets EQ be measured precisely against the others rather than serving as an indictment of the cognitive ones.

Short volume. Companion to the main VQ-Trade book.

For Readers Who Liked
  • Emotional Intelligence — Daniel Goleman
  • The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk
  • Behave — Robert Sapolsky
  • Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers — Robert Sapolsky
Audience

Pop-psychology readers, EQ practitioners, organizational-development readers, clinicians.

Also in The Vitruvian Quotient View series →

The Vitruvian Quotient
The Vitruvian Quotient
A Scientifically Grounded Human Intelligence Framework and a Neurological Gymnasium for the Future with AI
The Vitruvian Quotient: A Renaissance for Human Intelligence
The Vitruvian Quotient: A Renaissance for Human Intelligence
A Renaissance for Human Intelligence
VQ, the Abundant Society, and Engineered Adversity
VQ, the Abundant Society, and Engineered Adversity
How a post-scarcity civilization grows the humans it needs
Knowledge Quotient
Knowledge Quotient
Examen Factum and the Memory That Generates
Imran Cooper
Imran Cooper
Imran Stanton Cooper is the author of The Vitruvian Quotient, a scientifically grounded human-intelligence framework integrating eight peer-reviewed assessment domains into a single compensatory model. He holds the original copyright on VQ (July 2025) and has authored the framework's foundational academic paper, the trade adaptation, and the per-quotient series breaking down the science behind each domain.