Reuven Bar-On

Reuven Bar-On is an Israeli psychologist and one of the leading pioneers, theorists and researchers in emotional intelligence. Bar-On is thought to be the first to introduce the concept of an “EQ” to measure “emotional and social competence”, although the acronym was used earlier to describe ideas that were not associated with emotional intelligence per se. In the first copy of his doctoral dissertation, which was submitted in 1985, Bar-On proposed a quantitative approach to creating “an EQ analogous to an IQ score”.