Rob Emmerling
In April of 2005 Rob Emmerling, who was then webmaster at the EI Consortium engaged in an active campaign to defame and discredit me. Rob was allegedly concerned about the work I was doing in youth suicide prevention. Without contacting me about his alleged concerns, he located web sites that had links to EQI.org and sent out defamatory emails to webmasters of those sites. According to Rob, over 50 sites dropped their link to my site after receiving Rob's email.
I felt very misrepresented by Rob and I tried many times to get him to respond to my questions for him and to make some restitution, including a public apology on the EI Consortium website. Rob ignored all of my attempts to contact him. Rob showed no interest in understanding the work we do at EQI.org, even when he was given the opportunity to do so.
Here is what I wrote in 2005
As time goes on it becomes increasingly clear that Rob's prime motivation for sending out the emails was not his concern about my work in suicide prevention. I have made repeated attempts to discuss his concerns with him directly and he has failed to respond. It therefore seems clear that Rob's real motive in trying to discredit me was just to lower my influence on the web. The fewer the links to my site, the lower my Google ranking. The lower my Google ranking, the less people see my criticism of the EI Consortium and my criticism of people like Rob and members of the Consortium, such as Dan Goleman and Maurice Elias. Yet even after Rob's attempt to sabotage my site rankings, my site continues to be number one on EI. Rob's site, by the way, is number two and has been second to mine for many years. It is understandable Rob would like to see this reversed, but I'd like to see him show a little more integrity.
Rob, by the way, who was once just the webmaster for the EI Consortium's website, is now promoting himself as consultant in the field of EI. Thus his income depends not just on his salary as the webmaster anymore, but also on his reputation as an EI consultant. So this would obviously be a very personal motive for Rob not wanting potential clients to read my criticism of him. Before I created this page I had written an editorial which included criticism of him when he wrote to me and asked me how he and Goleman could post an article of theirs on my site. (See editorial 26 from August 2003) The editorial rose to a high ranking in Google when you searched for "Rob Emmerling", so even before I created this page devoted to Rob, he had reason to want to see my site rankings drop.
While what Rob did has disturbed me a great deal, and hurt my website traffic signficantly, at least for a time, I want to use this page on Rob to talk about more than just that. I want to let people know a few things about him since he is marketing himself as an authority on emotional intelligence.
I don't believe Rob is worthy of being called an authority EI. In my opinion he is mainly riding on the coattails of Dan Goleman. For the record, I don't believe Goleman is a credible authority on what I call emotional intelligence, either. The key to much of this is how we define emotional intelligence. If we define it as Goleman defines it, then fair enough. Goleman and his followers can call themselves and each other authorities and experts and go around the world making money promoting their concept of EI. But if we define it as something closer to what Mayer and Salovey have outlined (See their four branch model), then I don't believe it is fair to call either Goleman or Emmerling an authority on emotional intelligence.
S. Hein
Dec 9, 2005
Updated Feb 2006 and July 2012