How to Test Your Emotional Maturity

Knowing how emotionally mature someone is can be the most important thing to know about them; but this knowledge may take (painful) years to acquire. This is why we've devised a very quick and very reliable test that can - in a few minutes - help us to ascertain our own and other people's level of emotional maturity. It all has to do with how one responds to vulnerability.


FURTHER READING

“One of the more puzzling aspects of the way we’re built is that our emotional development does not necessarily or automatically keep pace with our physical growth. We can be fifty-five on the outside and four and a half in terms of our impulses and habitual manner of communicating – just as we can be on the threshold of adulthood physically while an emotional sage within.
In order to assess our own and others’ emotional development, we can make use of a single deceptively simple question that quickly gets to the core of our underlying emotional ‘age’.
When someone on whom we depend emotionally lets us down, disappoints us, or leaves us hanging and uncertain, what is our characteristic way of responding?...”

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CREDITS

Produced in collaboration with:

Elaine Song

Title animation produced in collaboration with

Vale Productions

[theschooloflifetv]

Did you take the test? How did you do? Let us know in the comments below and be sure to turn on notifications to ensure you don't miss our next film.

[Schneeregen_]

The toughest part is when you know what you want to say and it comes out as a jumbled mess of loosely related words.

[vallano]

It sucks whenever you calmly explain to someone how their actions bothered you and they end up taking it as though you're attacking their character or something.

[StealthyDead]

I think it's important to point out that you're not emotionally immature if your initial reactions are one of the three immature ones. I've learned through working as a mental health professional that we do oftentimes have those initial knee-jerk reactions internally because we are only human. However, giving those thoughts power or letting them influence your behavior is what makes you emotionally immature. You can think for a moment "ugh why aren't they getting back to me?" before centering yourself with "they're a busy adult and will respond to me when they are physically and emotionally available to do so." So don't get super down on yourself if you have some of those initial reactions. Just don't let them influence your actions or well being. Catch them. Correct them. Eventually, with a lot of practice, your initial reaction will become the corrected one.

[joshuaryan]

I just want to say that there is a huge difference in sulking/being angry at something you can't control and being upset/hurt, while in the process of grieving. You are allowed to grieve, you are allowed to feel your emotions as deep as they go, and you're even allowed to vent your anger too other people. Grieving doesn't make you emotionally-immature. People who are emotionally mature and more in tune with their emotions are more likely to grieve for longer.

[Phantom-bhru]

I once explained to my mother why I did not open up to her. She used it against me. Never again

[gregcasswell]

I can't see that anyone has mentioned how beautiful the animations were!

[hibana]

As a psychologist, I can tell you one other thing : People who explain why they are upset, but they are upset over something they think they deserve (which is objectively questionnable) while they're just acting like they're above everyone and cry when anything doesn't go the way they wanted are NOT MATURE. But on the paper of this video, they are portrayed as mature.

What maturity would be, is a state of mind where you accept things the way they are while trying to make the best out of them. Admit your wrong doings, let people come and go. And always have a window opened for the ones who didn't hurt you or atleast made honorable amends.

[themausi]

I'm incredibly emotionally immature but I found a partner patient enough to teach me maturity. It's been a year since I'm with him and I've grown so much already. It's exhausting but it's definitely worth it.

[icebear]

Seriously, they NEED to teach us this in school because these are things that we will use every single day of our lives, versus teaching us the countless things that we don't even remember.

[treeanimation]

I came in thinking i was emotionally mature and left finding im not

[ThatlilrayofSunshine]

I think that, as teens, we stand in the middle, the limbo. This is all due to our constant development. We can act emotionally mature at times, yet, on the other hand, that maturity seems to slip from our hands sometimes. Teens change as they begin to mature, just as everyone else, but our change is far more prominent since it is our transition from kid to adult. In the end, depending on how we live, react, and interact, it all consequently leads to the person we turn out to be. This is a great video that goes in-depth into the big contrast between being emotionally immature and mature, and that is truly amazing.

[chyimvanmeter]

I used to date this girl. A year and a half we dated. I wish I hadn't so long, but I learned a lot along the way. I used to lack the ability to explain or to understand well, and now I can. But she was enourmously immature and very emotionally young. It really ruined me mentally and it just makes me mad with myself to think of her. I learned a lot though, and that's what matters.

[AuthenticSelfGrowth]

A true mark of emotional maturity is when someone hurts you and you try to understand their situation instead of trying to hurt them back.

[occasionalshredder]

I used to hide my emotions, and when I started being open about them my friendships started ending, slowly one by one when people realized how they were making me feel, they strayed away from me, never talked to me again whatever it was we changed paths. I've come to learn that those friendships weren't forged on a love for eachother, but a love for ourselves, and self interests, when all you think about is how another person can make you feel and not what you can do for them, it stops feeling like true friendship

[CrackedPotato]

That analogy of rage and feeling powerful is so accurate. Those in power almost never show anger. Anger itself is part of the fight side of the fight or flight response, which comes from fear. Anger might help you feel powerful, but power doesn't mean rage.

[adriannelson]

The three 'cardinal virtues' of emotional maturity
1. Communication
2. Trust
3. Vulnerability

[anabuneta]

What sucks the most is when you are emotionally mature enough to try and sort out the problem calmly, but the other person isn’t

[maybe.yellow]

This is the most perfect grammar I've ever seen in a comment section.

[stan]

Because of autism, I deal with anger issues. I’ve been in social training several times and it has never really paid off. In that sense, you could say I am a bit emotionally immature — and will always be so. I’ve learned to cool down and communicate, though, and I think that speaks more of emotional maturity than immediately staying calm does. Not everyone has the ability to stay calm, afterall, and it isn’t as easily taught as most allistic people think.