Anabel Lee Jensen, born to two US Army officers who were of Danish descent, began attending
Brigham Young University in 1961, and graduated in 1966 with a BA in
psychology and a
Masters of Education. She received her
Ph.D. from the
University of California, Berkeley in 1976, where she majored in
child development and minored in
statistics. From 1983 to 1997, she was Executive Director of the Nueva Learning Center in California, where she helped develop the "Self-Science" curriculum featured in
Daniel Goleman's 1995 book
Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, which helped bring
EQ into the mainstream. In 1997, former Nueva School administrators and teachers Jensen, Karen McCown,
Joshua Freedman and Marsha Rideout left the school to found the Six Seconds EQ Network, a non-profit focused on education about EQ. As founding President, she has helped write training programs and
psychometric assessments for the organization, including Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment (SEI) and the Youth Version (SEI-YV). She co-founded the elementary and middle school Synapse School with Karen Stone-McCown in 2009. she is a full professor at the
Notre Dame de Namur University in California, where she teaches psychology to graduate students and is Department Chair of the school's College of Education. She is also a principal advisor to the Gifted Support Center and an advisor for Unite Education. In 2015, Jensen was named one of the top 100 Women of Influence for 2015 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal for her work in the field of emotional intelligence. She has been interviewed frequently in digital and print publications such as
Quartz (2015) and
bizjournals.com (2015).
Writing career Jensen has authored articles for outlets such as
Priorities Magazine and the
Discovery Channel, including the 1986 article
Greater than the parts: Shared decision making about the Nueva School, in the
Roeper Review. The second edition of
Self-Science was published in 1998, with Jensen contributing. She published
Joy and Loss: The Emotional Lives of Gifted Children with
Joshua Freedman in 1999, and the book
Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications was written based on Jensen providing curriculum access to the writer. In 2010, she published
Feeling Smart: Competencies Recommendations and Exercises. She has been a keynote speaker at national conferences on various topics. ==Awards==