Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI)

This belief is the core of our work at YCEI. We conduct research and offer trainings that support people of all ages in developing emotional intelligence skills. We do this work because the well-being and sustainability of our society depends on each of us using our emotions wisely.

As a self-supporting unit within the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center, our research and training is funded primarily through foundation and federal grants, corporate support, training revenue, and philanthropists. Our research is conducted in collaboration with experts in education, psychology, policy, and technology.

Our goal is to design effective approaches for supporting school communities in understanding the value of emotions, teaching the skills of emotional intelligence, and building and sustaining positive emotional climates in homes, schools, and workplaces.

We provide training to educational leaders, teachers, and school staff to support the systemic implementation of SEL (social and emotional learning) and foster those skills in all stakeholders in these communities, including in families and out-of-school time. We test and refine each element of our work, with the goal of leveraging emotions to create healthier and more equitable, innovative, and compassionate communities.

YCEI researchers actively work to be at the forefront of translational emotion science, building and evaluating tools to support students, teachers, and schools to thrive. We do this by conducting research on the science of emotions and emotional intelligence, evaluating programming aimed at fostering emotion skill development in children and adults, and advancing new practices in assessment and implementation science. We support the RULER Approach by providing continuous feedback to our content developers, testing and forwarding the evidence base for SEL, and measuring key outcomes including academic performance, relationship quality, school climate, and overall well-being.

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence researchers surveyed over 22,000 high school students nationwide about how they want to feel at school each day. Their responses were tired, stressed, and bored. The top responses from over 6,000 educators and school leaders were frustrated, overwhelmed, and stressed. If this is how members of our school communities feel, what impact might that have on how leaders lead, teachers teach, and students learn and grow?

RULER helps students and educators spend more time feeling how they want to feel: valued, connected, and inspired. RULER supports entire school communities in understanding the value of emotions, building emotion skills, and creating and maintaining positive school climates.