The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence identifies five component skills of emotional intelligence: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions. Recognizing and understanding one’s emotions, in turn, hinge on self-awareness. Managing emotions, especially difficult ones, is such a critical skill, researchers find, that it is a major underpinning of success in life. Another key facet of emotional intelligence is empathy, the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of others; the success of long-term relationships hinges on it.