Last week on the Newsweek website, science bloggers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman invited Daniel Goleman, co-chairman of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence at Rutgers University, to respond to several skeptical articles the pair had posted on social and emotional learning.

The Newsweek bloggers recently published Nurtureshock which questions accepted wisdom about how to be a parent, and they are suspicious of the claims that have been made for emotional intelligence – particularly its contribution to success later in life.

“Measurable emotional intelligence isn’t predictive of all the positive life outcomes that have been promised,” they wrote, maintaining that, for all its flaws, the SAT exam used to test college readiness in the US was still the best predictor of achievement in higher education and later in life.

Goleman conceded that there had been confusion over the contribution of emotional intelligence to life success. Much had been made of the erroneous notion, sometimes attributed to him, that emotional intelligence accounted for 80% of achievement in the workplace, he said.

He had actually written that IQ only accounted for 20%. The other 80% was explained by many other factors – sheer luck as well as emotional intelligence. Nevertheless, when assessing the success of a group of people who exceeded a certain level of intelligence, qualities such as emotional intelligence became far more significant.

Goleman insisted that huge advances had been made in the field since the publication of his Emotional Intelligence in 1996. Dozens of scales had been designed to measure the concept and there was more evidence to show how much it mattered.

The authors of Nurtureshock questioned whether emotional intelligence should be considered “intelligence” at all, arguing that it was just a fancy name for social skills. They pointed to research studies that demonstrated a very low or non-existent correlation between emotional intelligence and IQ.

Goleman passed off the academic gains for students from social and emotional learning as secondary benefits. The main payback, he argued, came in the form of improved classroom behavior, better attention and bonding with school and teachers. All of these helped children to learn better.

He also pointed to the work of Mark Greenberg at Penn State University whose PATHS curriculum – a model social and emotional learning program – had shown that increases in academic achievement could be attributed to improvements in attention and working memory.

Bearing in mind the demands on school time and other resources, Bronson and Merryman asked whether social and emotional learning curricula should be for everyone. (The received wisdom is that they should be carried out school-wide, taking up several lessons every week.)

Certain introverted children needed a helping hand to interact, but most most learned perfectly well in the course of their ordinary interaction with parents and teachers. “From the earliest ages,” they wrote, "we tell kids ‘use your words’ when they’re upset. We tell them to share and take turns. We ask them to think about how their actions make other kids feel. We make them apologize and hug to make up."

The two skeptics await the results of meta-analysis of the effects of social and emotional learning programs by Roger Weissberg and colleagues at the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning.

The report is currently under review for publication in the journal Child Development [See: Adding the nerve to working together]

It apparently shows that programs result in an impressive 11% increase in academic achievement across the board, as well as a boost in attention levels in class and reductions in violence and antisocial behavior.

Bronson and Merryman are unlikely to be convinced. They have likened SEL to medication for blood pressure which has the side effect of clearing up acne. Good news, but targeted treatments for acne are more effective.

• To read more on emotional intelligence and provocative comment on the UK’s experience of the SEAL social and emotional skills program, see Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s Nurtureshock blog