It was one of those terribly hot days in Baltimore. Needless to say, it was too hot to do anything outside. But it was also scorching in our apartment. This was 1962, and I would not live in a place with an air conditioner for another ten years. So my brother and I decided to leave the apartment to find someplace indoors. He suggested we could see a movie. It was a brilliant plan.

    Movie theaters were one of the few places you could sit all day and—most important —sit in air conditioning. In those days, you could buy one ticket and sit through two movies. Then, the theater would show the same two movies again. If you wanted to, you could sit through them twice. Most people did not do that, but the manager at our theater. Mr. Bellow did not mind if you did.

    That particular day, my brother and I sat through both movies twice, trying to escape the heat. We bought three bags of popcorn and three sodas each. Then, we sat and watched The Music Man followed by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. We'd already seen the second movie once before. It had been at the theater since January, because Mr. Bellow loved anything with John Wayne in it.

    We left the theater around 8, just before the evening shows began. But we returned the next day and saw the same two movies again, twice more. And we did it the next day too. Finally, on the fourth day, the heat wave broke.

    Still, to this day I can sing half the songs in The Music Man and recite half of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart's dialogue from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance! Those memories are some of the few I have of the heat wave of 1962. They're really memories of the screen, not memories of my life.

For nearly a decade now, Merebeth has been a self-employed pet transport specialist. Her pet transport job was born of the financial crisis (危机) in the late 2000s. The downturn hit the real estate (房地产) firm where she had worked for ten years as an office manager. The firm went broke and left her looking for a new job. One day, while driving near her home, she saw a dog wandering on the road, clearly lost She took it home, and her sister in Denver agreed to take it This was a loving home for sure, but 1. 600 miles away. It didn't take long for
Merebeth to decide to drive the dog there herself. It was her first road trip to her new job.

Merebeth's pet delivery service also satisfies her wanderlust. It has taken her to every state in the US except Montana Washington, and Oregon, she says proudly. If she wants to visit a new place, she will simply find a pet with transport needs there. She travels in all weathers. She has driven through 55 mph winds in Wyoming, heavy flooding and storms in Alabama and total whiteout conditions in Kansas.

This wanderlust is inherited from her father, she says. He moved their family from Canada to California when she was one year old, because he wanted them to explore a new place together As soon as she graduated from high school, she left home to live on Catalina Island off the Californian coast, away from her parents, where she enjoyed a life of sailing and off-road biking.

It turns out that pet transporting pays quite well at about $30, 000 per year before tax. She doesn't work in summer; as it would be unpleasantly hot for the animals in the car; even with air conditioning. As autumn comes, she gets restless-the same old wanderlust returning. It's a call she must heed alone, though. Merebeth says, "When I am on the road, I'm just in my own world. I've always been independent-spirited, and I just feel strongly that I mush help animals. "

Popularization has in some cases changed the original meaning of emotional intelligence. Many people now misunderstand emotional intelligence as almost everything desirable in a person's makeup that cannot be measured by an IQ test, such as character, motivation, confidence, mental stability, optimism and “people skills.” Research has shown that emotional skills may contribute to some of these qualities, but most of them move far beyond skill-based emotional intelligence.

We prefer to describe emotional intelligence as a specific set of skills that can be used for either good or bad purposes. The ability to accurately understand how others are feeling may be used by a doctor to find how best to help her patients, while a cheater might use it to control potential victims. Being emotionally intelligent does not necessarily make one a moral person.

Although popular beliefs regarding emotional intelligence run far ahead of what research can reasonably support, the overall effects of the publicity have been more beneficial than harmful. The most positive aspect of this popularization is a new and much needed emphasis on emotion by employers, educators and others interested in promoting social well-being. The popularization of emotional intelligence has helped both the public and researchers re-evaluate the functionality of emotions and how they serve people adaptively in everyday life.

Although the continuing popular appeal of emotional intelligence is desirable, we hope that such attention will excite a greater interest in the scientific and scholarly study of emotion. It is our hope that in coming decades, advances in science will offer new perspectives ( 视角) from which to study how people manage their lives. Emotional intelligence, with its focus on both head and heart, may serve to point us in the right direction.