About Reuven BarOn’s Involvement in Emotional Intelligence

Reuven BarOn has worked as a clinical psychologist since 1972. He earned his doctorate at Rhodes University in South Africa and currently holds a faculty appointment at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, where he directs research in emotional and social intelligence at UTMB. He is also affiliated with the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) at the University of Illinois where he is an advisor on EI assessment, and he was accepted into the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University as the first non-founding member.

Reuven BarOn is an internationally acknowledged expert and pioneer in emotional intelligence and has been involved in defining, measuring and applying various aspects of this concept since 1980. He coined the term “EQ” (“emotional quotient”) in 1985 to describe his approach to assessing emotional and social competence. He created the Emotional Quotient Inventory (the EQ-i), which is the first test of emotional intelligence to be published by a psychological test publisher (1997) and reviewed in the Buros Mental Measurement Yearbook (1999); over one million EQ-i assessments have been conducted worldwide in the first five years since its publication, making it one of the most popular psychological tests. He co-authored the EQ-i:YV, which is the first commercially available test designed to assess emotionally and socially intelligent behavior in children (2000); in addition to being favorably reviewed by the Buros Mental Measurement Yearbook (2001), it has been selected by a team of psychometricians at the University of Oxford as the EI test of choice for children and recommended for use in schools in the UK (2003). He also co-edited the Handbook of Emotional Intelligence (2000), which is one of the first academic texts on this topic to be published. Based on a training manual he wrote with Richard Handley, Optimizing People, he co-authored the first Internet-delivered training program designed to improve EI competencies. With Richard Handley, he also developed the EQ-360 and is presently developing the EQ-Interview (2003).

Reuven BarOn has been involved in numerous research projects related to emotional intelligence over the past two decades. A recent example includes a three-year study in the Israeli Defense Forces that empirically demonstrates the impact of EI on performance and its ability to predict command leadership. He has also analyzed and summarized the findings of an extensive research project conducted by Marian Ruderman at the Center for Creative Leadership that confirms the ability of EI to identify and predict successful corporate leaders. On an ongoing basis in the corporate world moreover, Reuven BarOn is involved in developing customized EI models that are used in hiring and training. Furthermore, he is currently involved in a 25-year longitudinal study of 23,000 youth to determine the inter-relationship between emotional intelligence and biomedical, cognitive, developmental, social and educational factors; this study, which is being conducted by Human Resources Development Canada, represents the first longitudinal study of emotional intelligence and is expected to shed light on how this construct develops, what affects it and what is affected by it. He is also involved in ongoing research projects examining the neurological substrate of emotional and social intelligence as well as its impact on physical and psychological disorders. Together with colleagues at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, he published the first peer-reviewed paper on the neurological basis of emotional intelligence (Brain, 2003).

This is what Daniel Goleman said about Reuven BarOn’s involvement in emotional intelligence: Your work is leading the way in moving this field forward.”

His work has been described in encyclopaedias, books, articles and presentations as well in numerous newspaper, radio and television interviews around the world. He has also reviewed manuscripts related to emotional intelligence for peer-reviewed journals and has been asked to be a guest editor for one of these journals. Additional electronic information regarding Reuven BarOn can be obtained from Multi-Health Systems (www.mhs.com) and the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations (eiconsortium.org).

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