Emotional Intelligence | Stevehein.com
Copy of ariticle by Grewel and Salovey from Keep Smart
--
Feeling smart: the science of emotional intelligence; A new idea in psychology has matured and shows promise of explaining how attending to emotions can help us in everyday life
By Daisy Grewal and Peter Salovey, Jul 1, 2005
Over the past decade almost everyone tuned in to American
popular culture has heard the term emotional intelligence. As a
new concept, emotional intelligence has been a hit: It has been
the subject of several books, including a best seller, and myriad
talk-show discussions and seminars for schools and organizations.
Today you can hire a coach to help you raise your "EQ,"
your emotional quotient--or your child's.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its high public profile,
emotional intelligence has attracted considerable scientific
criticism. Some of the controversy arises from the fact that
popular and scientific definitions of emotional intelligence
differ sharply. In addition, measuring emotional intelligence has
not been easy. Despite these difficulties, research on emotional
intelligence has managed to sustain itself and in fact shows
considerable promise as a serious line of scientific inquiry. It
turns out that emotional intelligence can indeed be measured, as
a set of mental abilities, and that doing so is an informative
exercise that can help individuals understand the role of
emotions in their everyday lives.
Ten years after the appearance of that bestselling book and a
TIME magazine cover that asked "What's your EQ?" it
seems sensible to ask what is known, scientifically, about
emotional intelligence. In the history of modern psychology, the
concept represents a stage in the evolution of our thinking about
the relation between passion and reason and represents an
important outgrowth of new theories of intelligence. Work in this
subfield has produced a four-factor model of emotional
intelligence that serves as a guide for empirical research. In
this article we will explain ways of assessing emotional
intelligence using ability-based tests and some of the findings
that have resulted from this method.
Before "Emotional Intelligence"
Philosophers have debated the relation between thought and
emotions for at least two millennia. The Stoics of ancient Greece
and Rome believed emotion far too heated and unpredictable to be
of much use to rational thought. Emotion was also strongly
associated with women, in their view, and therefore
representative of the weak, inferior aspects of humanity. The
stereotype of women as the more "emotional" sex is one
that persists today. Even though various romantic movements
embraced emotion over the centuries, the Stoic view of emotions
as more or less irrational persisted in one form or another well
into the 20th century.
But many notions were upended during the rapid development of
modern psychology in the 20th century. Setting the stage for a
new way of thinking about emotions and thought, psychologists
articulated broader definitions of intelligence and also new
perspectives on the relation between feeling and thinking. As
early as the 1930s, psychometrician Robert Thorndike mentioned
the possibility that people might have a "social
intelligence"--an ability to perceive their own and others'
internal states, motivations and behaviors, and act accordingly.
In 1934 David Wechsler, the psychologist whose name today
attaches to two well-known intelligence tests, wrote about the
"non-intellective" aspects of a person that contribute
to overall intelligence. Thorndike's and Wechsler's statements
were, however, speculations. Even though social intelligence
seemed a definite possibility, Thorndike admitted that there
existed little scientific evidence of its presence. A similar
conclusion was reached by psychometric expert Lee Cronbach, who
in 1960 declared that, after half a century of speculation,
social intelligence remained "undefined and
unmeasured."
But the 1980s brought a surge of new interest in expanding the
definition of intelligence. In 1983 Howard Gardner of Harvard
University became famous overnight when, in the book Frames of
Mind, he outlined seven distinct forms of intelligence. Gardner
proposed an "intrapersonal intelligence" very similar
to the current conceptualization of emotional intelligence.
"The core capacity at work here," he wrote, "is
access to one's own feeling life--one's range of affects or
emotions: the capacity instantly to effect discriminations among
these feelings and, eventually, to label them, to enmesh them in
symbolic codes, to draw upon them as a means of understanding and
guiding one's behavior."
Is "emotional intelligence," then, simply a new name
for social intelligence and other already-defined
"intelligences"? We hope to clear up this thorny
question by explaining just what we attempt to measure when
assessing emotional intelligence. Certainly it can be seen as a
type of social intelligence, but we prefer to explicitly focus on
the processing of emotions and knowledge about emotion-related
information and suggest that this constitutes its own form of
intelligence. Social intelligence is very broadly defined, and
partly for this reason the pertinent skills involved have
remained elusive to scientists.
Assessing emotional intelligence through self-report measures
also presents the same dilemma one would face in trying to assess
standard analytic intelligence by asking people, "Do you
think you're smart?" Of course most people want to appear
smart. Also, individuals may not have a good idea of their own
strengths and weaknesses, especially in the domain of emotions.
Similarly, although reports made by others seem more promising in
providing accurate information, they are also highly vulnerable
to biased viewpoints and subjective interpretations of behavior.
In an attempt to overcome these problems, the first ability-based
measure of emotional intelligence was introduced in 1998 in the
form of the Multi-factor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS). An
improved and professionally published version of the MEIS, from
which problematic items were eliminated, was released in 2002 in
the form of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test
(MSCEIT, named for Mayer, Salovey and collaborator David R.
Caruso of the EI Skills Group).
The MSCEIT consists of eight different tasks--two tasks devoted
to each of the four branches of emotional intelligence. For
example, the first branch, perceiving emotions, is tested by
presenting participants with a photograph of a person and then
asking them to rate the amount of sadness, happiness, fear etc.
that they detect in the person's facial expression. Skill in
using emotions is tested by having people indicate how helpful
certain moods, such as boredom or happiness, would be for
performing certain activities, such as planning a birthday party.
The understanding-emotions portion of the test includes questions
that ask participants to complete sentences testing their
knowledge of emotion vocabulary and how emotions can progress
from one to another. The test section addressing the fourth
branch, managing emotions, presents participants with real-life
scenarios. Participants are asked to choose, from several
options, the best strategy for handling the emotions brought up
in each scenario. After completing the MSCEIT, scores are
generated for each of the four branches as well as an overall
total score.
How Good Is the Test?
Marc A. Brackett of Yale University and Mayer calculated the
extensive overlap between self-report tests of emotional
intelligence and commonly used tests of personality. Many studies
of personality are organized around The Big Five model of
personality; they ask participants to self-rate how much they
exhibit the following traits: neuroticism, extraversion,
openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Brackett and Mayer administered scales assessing The Big Five to
a group of college students along with the MSCEIT and the SREIT.
They found that scores on Big Five personality traits were more
highly correlated with participants' scores on the SREIT than on
the MSCEIT. The trait of "extraversion," for example,
had a correlation of 0.37 with scores on the SREIT but only
correlated 0.11 with scores on the MSCEIT. Therefore, it appears
that self-report tests of emotional intelligence may offer
limited information about a person above and beyond standard
personality questionnaires.
The biggest problem one faces in trying to use an ability-based
measure of emotional intelligence is how to determine correct
answers. Unlike traditional intelligence tests, emotional
intelligence tests can lack clear right or wrong solutions. There
are dozens of ways one could handle many emotion-laden
situations, so who should decide which is the emotionally
intelligent way of doing things? Intrinsic to the four-branch
model of emotional intelligence is the hypothesis that emotional
skills cannot be separated from their social context. To use
emotions in a useful way, one must be attuned to the social and
cultural norms of the environment in which one interacts.
Therefore, the model proposes that correct answers will depend
highly upon agreement with others of one's own social group.
Furthermore, experts on emotion research should also have the
ability to identify correct answers, since scientific methods
have provided us with good knowledge on correct alternatives to
emotion-related problems.
Consequently, the MSCEIT is scored using two different methods:
general consensus and expert scoring. In consensus scoring, an
individual's answers are statistically compared with the answers
that were provided by a diverse worldwide sample of 5,000
respondents aged 18 or older who completed the MSCEIT prior to
May 2001. The sample is both educationally and ethnically
diverse, with respondents from seven different countries
including the United States.
In the consensus approach, greater statistical overlap with the
sample's answers reflects higher emotional intelligence. In
expert scoring, a person's answers are compared with those
provided by a group of emotion experts, in this case 21 emotion
investigators elected to the International Society for Research
on Emotions (ISRE).
The amount of overlap between consensus and expert scoring has
been carefully examined. Participants' responses have been scored
first using the consensus method and then the expert method, and
these results are then correlated with each other. The average
correlation between the two sets of scores is greater than 0.90,
indicating sizable overlap between the opinions of experts and
the general consensus of test-takers. Laypeople and emotion
experts, in other words, converge on the most "emotionally
intelligent" answers. The scores of the experts tend to
agree with one another more than do those of the consensus group,
indicating that emotion experts are more likely to possess a
shared social representation of what constitutes emotional
intelligence.
The MSCEIT has demonstrated good reliability, meaning that scores
tend to be consistent over time and that the test is internally
consistent. In sum, given its modest overlap with commonly used
tests of personality traits and analytic intelligence, the MSCEIT
seems to test reliably for something that is distinct from both
personality and IQ.
Putting Research to Work
Research on emotional intelligence has been put to practical use
with unusual speed. The reason may be simple: Experiments suggest
that scores on ability-based measures of emotional intelligence
are associated with a number of important real-world outcomes.
Emotional intelligence may help one get along with peers and
supervisors at work. Paulo N. Lopes of the University of Surrey
in the United Kingdom spearheaded a study conducted at a Fortune
500 insurance company where employees worked in teams. Each team
was asked to fill out surveys that asked individuals to rate
other team members on personal descriptors related to emotions
such as, "This person handles stress without getting too
tense," or "This person is aware of the feelings of
others."
Supervisors in the company were also asked to rate their
subordinates on similar items. Everyone who participated in the
study also took the MSCEIT. Although the sample of participants
was small, employees who scored higher on the MSCEIT received
more positive ratings from both their peers and their
supervisors. Their peers reported having fewer conflicts with
them, and they were perceived as creating a positive atmosphere
at work. Supervisors rated their emotionally intelligent
employees as more interpersonally sensitive, sociable, tolerant
of stress and possessing more leadership potential. Higher scores
were also positively associated with rank and salary in the
company.
Emotional intelligence may also be important for creating and
sustaining good relationships with peers. A different study
conducted by Lopes and his collaborators asked German college
students to keep diaries that described their everyday
interactions with others over a two-week period. For every social
interaction that lasted at least 10 minutes, students were asked
to record the gender of the person they interacted with, how they
felt about the interaction, how much they had wanted to make a
certain impression, and to what extent they thought they
succeeded in making that impression.
Scores on the using-emotions branch of the MSCEIT were positively
related to how enjoyable and interesting students found their
interactions to be, as well as how important and safe they felt
during them. Scores on the managing-emotions branch seemed most
important in interactions with the opposite sex. For these
interactions, students scoring high on managing emotions reported
more enjoyment, intimacy, interest, importance and respect. In
addition, managing emotions was positively related to the
students' beliefs that they had made the desired impression on
their opposite-sex partners (coming across as friendly, say, or
competent).
Brackett also investigated how scores on the MSCE1T relate to the
quality of social relationships among college students. American
college students completed the MSCEIT along with questionnaires
assessing the quality of their friendships and their
interpersonal skills. In addition, these students were asked to
recruit two of their friends to evaluate the quality of their
friendship. Individuals scoring high in managing emotions were
rated as more caring and emotionally supportive by their friends.
Scores on managing emotions were also negatively related to
friends' reports of conflict with them. In another recent study
by Nicole Lerner and Brackett, Yale students who scored higher in
emotional intelligence were evaluated more positively by their
roommates; that is, their roommates reported experiencing less
conflict with them.
Emotional intelligence may also help people more successfully
navigate their relationships with spouses and romantic partners.
Another study headed by Brackett recruited 180 young couples
(mean age 25 years) from the London area. The couples completed
the MSCEIT and then filled out a variety of questionnaires asking
about aspects of the couples' relationships, such as the quality
of the interactions with their partners and how happy they were
with the relationship. Happiness was correlated with high scores
for both partners, and where one partner had a high score and the
other a low score, satisfaction ratings tended to fall in the
intermediate range.
The Future of Emotional Intelligence
see page2.txt
Emotional intelligence is a more focused concept. Dealing with
emotions certainly has important implications for social
relationships, but emotions also contribute to other aspects of
life. Each of us has a need to set priorities, orient positively
toward future endeavors and repair negative moods before they
spiral into anxiety and depression. The concept of emotional
intelligence isolates a specific set of skills embedded within
the abilities that are broadly encompassed by the notion of
social intelligence.
Emotion and Thinking
New understandings of the relation between thought and emotion
have strengthened the scientific foundation of the study of
emotional intelligence. Using a simple decision-making task,
neurologist Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues at the
University of Iowa have provided convincing evidence that emotion
and reason are essentially inseparable. When making decisions,
people often focus on the logical pros and cons of the choices
they face. However, Damasio has shown that without feelings, the
decisions we make may not be in our best interest.
In the early 1990s Damasio had people participate in a gambling
task in which the goal is to maximize profit on a loan of play
money. Participants were instructed to select 100 cards, one at a
time, from four different decks. The experimenter arranged the
cards such that two of the decks provided larger payoffs ($100
compared to only $50) but also doled out larger penalties at
unpredictable intervals. Players who chose from the
higher-reward, higher-risk decks lost a net of $250 every 10
cards; those choosing the $50 decks gained a net of $250 every 10
cards.
One group of participants in this study had been identified as
having lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the
brain. Patients with this type of brain damage have normal
intellectual function but are unable to use emotion in making
decisions. The other group was normal, meaning that their brains
were fully intact. Because there was no way for any of the
players to calculate precisely which decks were riskier, they had
to rely on their "gut" feelings to avoid losing money.
Damasio's group demonstrated that the brain-lesion patients
failed to pay attention to these feelings (which he deems
"somatic markers") and subsequently lost significantly
more money than the normal participants. Therefore, defects in
the brain that impair emotion and feeling detection can
subsequently impair decision-making. Damasio concluded that
"individuals make judgments not only by assessing the
severity of outcomes, but also and primarily in terms of their
emotional quality." This experiment demonstrates that
emotions and thought processes are closely connected. Whatever
notions we draw from our Stoic and Cartesian heritages,
separating thinking and feeling is not necessarily more adaptive
and may, in some cases, lead to disastrous consequences.
The Four-Branch Model
The term "emotional intelligence" was perhaps first
used in an unpublished dissertation in 1986. One of us (Salovey),
along with John D. Mayer of the University of New Hampshire,
introduced it to scientific psychology in 1990, defining
emotional intelligence as "the ability to monitor one's own
and others' feelings, to discriminate among them, and to use this
information to guide one's thinking and action."
Some critics have seen the concept of emotional intelligence as a
mere outgrowth of the late-20th-century zeitgeist--and indeed, as
we reflect in the conclusion to this article, today the term has
a vibrant pop-culture life of its own. But within psychology, the
concept developed out of a growing emphasis on research on the
interaction of emotion and thought. In the late 1970s
psychologists conducted experiments that looked at a number of
seemingly unrelated topics at the interface of feeling and
thinking: the effect of depression on memory, the perception of
emotion in facial expressions, the functional importance of
regulating or expressing emotion.
Emotional intelligence is one of the concepts that emerged from
this work. It integrates a number of the results into a related
set of skills that can be measured and differentiated from
personality and social skills; within psychology it can be
defined as an intelligence because it is a quantifiable and
indeed a measurable aspect of the individual's capacity to carry
out abstract thought and to learn and adapt to the environment.
Emotional intelligence can be shown to operate on emotional
information in the same way that other types of intelligence
might operate on a broken computer or what a photographer sees in
her viewfinder.
Interested in helping the field of emotions develop a theory that
would organize the numerous efforts to find individual difference
in emotion-related processes, Salovey and Mayer proposed a
four-branch model of emotional intelligence that emphasized four
domains of related skills: (a) the ability to perceive emotions
accurately; (b) the ability to use emotions to facilitate
thinking and reasoning; (c) the ability to understand emotions,
especially the language of emotions; and (d) the ability to
manage emotions both in oneself and in others. This four-branch
emotional intelligence model proposes that individuals differ in
these skills and that these differences have consequences at
home, school and work, and in social relations.
Perceiving and Using Emotions
The first domain of emotional intelligence, perceiving emotions,
includes the abilities involved in identifying emotions in faces,
voices, pictures, music and other stimuli. For example, the
individual who excels at perceiving emotions can quickly tell
when his friend is upset by accurately decoding his friend's
facial expressions.
One might consider this the most basic skill involved in
emotional intelligence because it makes all other processing of
emotional information possible. In addition, our skill at reading
faces is one of the attributes humans share across cultures. Paul
Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco showed
pictures of Americans expressing different emotions to a group of
isolated New Guineans. He found that the New Guineans could
recognize what emotions were being expressed in the photographs
quite accurately, even though they had never encountered an
American and had grown up in a completely different culture.
But emotion perception does vary across individuals. A study by
Seth D. Pollak at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000,
for example, demonstrated that physical abuse might interfere
with children's ability to adaptively perceive facial
expressions.
Pollak asked abused and nonabused children, aged 8 to 10, to come
into the laboratory to play "computer games." The
children were shown digitally morphed faces that displayed
emotional expressions that ranged from happy to fearful, happy to
sad, angry to fearful, or angry to sad. In one of the games, the
children were shown a single picture and asked to identify which
emotion it expressed. Because all the faces expressed varying
degrees of a certain emotion, the investigators were able to
discover how the children perceived different facial expressions.
They found that the abused children were more likely to
categorize a face as angry, even when it showed only a slight
amount of anger.
In addition, Pollak measured the brain activity of the children
while completing this task using electrodes attached to their
scalps. The abused children also exhibited more brain activity
when viewing an angry face. This research shows that life
experiences can strongly shape the recognition of facial
expression. We can speculate that this difference in likelihood
to perceive anger may have important consequences for the
children's interactions with other people.
The second branch of emotional intelligence, using emotions, is
the ability to harness emotional information to facilitate other
cognitive activities. Certain moods may create mind-sets that are
better suited for certain kinds of tasks.
In a clever experiment done during the 1980s, Alice Isen of
Cornell University found that being in a happy mood helps people
generate more creative solutions to problems. Isen brought
undergraduates into the laboratory and induced either a positive
mood (by showing them comedy clips) or a neutral mood (by showing
them a short segment from a math film).
After watching one of the films, each student was seated at an
individual table and given a book of matches, a box of tacks and
a candle. Above the table was a corkboard. The students were
given 10 minutes to provide a solution to the following
challenge: how to affix the candle to the corkboard in such a way
that it would burn without dripping wax onto the table. Those
students who had watched the comedy films, and were therefore in
a happier mood, were more likely to come up with an adequate
solution to the problem: They realized that the task can be
easily accomplished by emptying the box, tacking it to the wall
and using it as a platform for the candle. It appears that
emotional intelligence can facilitate certain tasks; the
emotionally intelligent person can utilize pleasant feelings most
effectively.
Understanding and Managing Emotion
Mayer and Salovey classified the third and fourth branches of the
emotional intelligence model as "strategic" (rather
than "experiential") intelligence. The third branch,
understanding emotions, is the ability to comprehend information
about relations between emotions, transitions from one emotion to
another, and to label emotions using emotion words. A person who
is good at understanding emotions would have the ability to see
differences between related emotions, such as between pride and
joy. The same individual would also be able to recognize, for
instance, that irritation can lead to rage if left unattended.
Boston College psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has demonstrated
that the ability to differentiate one's emotional states has
important implications for well-being. Feldman Barrett and her
colleagues asked a group of 53 undergraduates to keep a daily
diary of their emotions for two weeks. Specifically, they
assessed the most intense emotional experience they had each day
by rating the intensity of their experience of nine emotions,
represented by words, on a scale from 0, not at all, to 4, very
much. Four of the emotion words related to positive emotion
(happiness, joy, enthusiasm, amusement); five related to negative
emotion (nervous, angry, sad, ashamed, guilty).
Feldman Barrett and her colleagues then calculated the
correlations between reported experiences of positive emotions
and also looked at how correlated were reported experiences of
negative emotions. A subject whose reports of positive emotions
are highly correlated is perceiving less differentiation between
positive states. Similarly, larger correlations between the
reports of each negative emotion indicate less differentiation
between negative states.
At the end of the study, all participants completed a
questionnaire assessing the extent to which they engaged in
various emotion-regulation strategies during the previous two
weeks (for example, "talking to others"). Greater
differentiation between positive emotional states had no effect
on regulation strategies. But differentiation of negative states
clearly did. That is, participants who were able to more
specifically pinpoint what negative emotion they were feeling
each day also engaged in more strategies for managing their
emotions. This shows that the ability to distinguish and label
emotions may represent an important skill in learning how to
handle emotions successfully.
The fourth branch of emotional intelligence is the ability to
manage one's emotions as well as the emotions of others. This
skill of managing emotions is perhaps the most commonly
identified aspect of emotional intelligence. Emotional
intelligence is far more than simply being able to regulate bad
moods effectively. It can also be important to maintain negative
emotions when needed. For example, a speaker trying to persuade
her audience of some injustice should have the ability to use her
own outrage to stir others to action.
An example of how using different strategies for managing
emotions can have different consequences is found in the work of
James S. Gross of Stanford University. In experiments during the
mid-1990s, Gross showed undergraduates video clips from medical
procedures, such as amputation, that elicit disgust. The students
were divided into three different groups. In the suppression
condition, the students were instructed to hide their emotions
during the film as much as possible by limiting their facial
expressions. In the reappraisal condition, students were
instructed to view the film as objectively as possible and to
remain emotionally detached from what they were seeing. The third
group was given no special instructions before viewing the film.
All of the students' reactions to the films were recorded by
video camera, and their physiological reactions, such as heart
rate and skin conductance, were also measured. In addition,
participants were asked to make self-reports of their feelings
before, during and after watching the film.
The students in the suppression and reappraisal conditions had
strikingly different experiences from watching the film. In the
suppression condition, participants were able to successfully
reduce the outward experience of their emotions by reducing their
facial expressions and other behavioral reactions to the film.
However, they showed heightened physiological arousal and
reported feeling as much disgust as controls. The participants in
the reappraisal condition reported lower levels of disgust upon
watching the film while not displaying any heightened physical
arousal (compared to controls). Gross's work demonstrates that
there might be important, and sometimes hidden, physical costs
for those individuals who chronically suppress expression of
their negative emotions; nevertheless, monitoring and evaluating
one's emotions may be strategically useful.
Measuring Emotional Intelligence
Any attribute being suggested as a form of intelligence must meet
the standards of psychometrics, the field of psychological
measurement. Scientists must be able to show that tests do not
merely capture personality traits or information about other
abilities. Three approaches to measuring emotional intelligence
have been used: self-report tests, reports made by others and
ability-based tests. Self-report tests were developed first and
continue to be widely used, owing to the ease with which they can
be administered and scored. Test-takers agree or disagree with
items that attempt to capture various aspects of perceived
emotional intelligence. For example, the popular Self-Report
Emotional Intelligence Test (SREIT), authored by Nicola Schutte,
asks respondents to rate how much they agree with such items as
"I have control over my emotions," and "Other
people find it easy to confide in me."
Reports made by others are commonly collected using
"360" instruments. People who frequently interact with
one another (such as friends and colleagues) are asked to rate
one another's apparent degree of emotional intelligence. These
instruments commonly contain items similar to those used in
self-report tests, such as the statement "This person has
control over his or her emotions."
Unfortunately, self-report tests assess self-estimates of
attributes that often extend beyond definitions of emotional
intelligence. They tend to incorporate facets of personality and
character traditionally measured by existing personality tests.
Assessing emotional intelligence through self-report measures also presents the same dilemma one would face in trying to assess standard analytic intelligence by asking people, "Do you think you're smart?" Of course most people want to appear smart. Also, individuals may not have a good idea of their own strengths and weaknesses, especially in the domain of emotions. Similarly, although reports made by others seem more promising in providing accurate information, they are also highly vulnerable to biased viewpoints and subjective interpretations of behavior.
In an attempt to overcome these problems, the first ability-based measure of emotional intelligence was introduced in 1998 in the form of the Multi-factor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS). An improved and professionally published version of the MEIS, from which problematic items were eliminated, was released in 2002 in the form of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT, named for Mayer, Salovey and collaborator David R. Caruso of the EI Skills Group).
The MSCEIT consists of eight different tasks--two tasks devoted to each of the four branches of emotional intelligence. For example, the first branch, perceiving emotions, is tested by presenting participants with a photograph of a person and then asking them to rate the amount of sadness, happiness, fear etc. that they detect in the person's facial expression. Skill in using emotions is tested by having people indicate how helpful certain moods, such as boredom or happiness, would be for performing certain activities, such as planning a birthday party. The understanding-emotions portion of the test includes questions that ask participants to complete sentences testing their knowledge of emotion vocabulary and how emotions can progress from one to another. The test section addressing the fourth branch, managing emotions, presents participants with real-life scenarios. Participants are asked to choose, from several options, the best strategy for handling the emotions brought up in each scenario. After completing the MSCEIT, scores are generated for each of the four branches as well as an overall total score.
How Good Is the Test?
Marc A. Brackett of Yale University and Mayer calculated the extensive overlap between self-report tests of emotional intelligence and commonly used tests of personality. Many studies of personality are organized around The Big Five model of personality; they ask participants to self-rate how much they exhibit the following traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Brackett and Mayer administered scales assessing The Big Five to a group of college students along with the MSCEIT and the SREIT. They found that scores on Big Five personality traits were more highly correlated with participants' scores on the SREIT than on the MSCEIT. The trait of "extraversion," for example, had a correlation of 0.37 with scores on the SREIT but only correlated 0.11 with scores on the MSCEIT. Therefore, it appears that self-report tests of emotional intelligence may offer limited information about a person above and beyond standard personality questionnaires.
The biggest problem one faces in trying to use an ability-based measure of emotional intelligence is how to determine correct answers. Unlike traditional intelligence tests, emotional intelligence tests can lack clear right or wrong solutions. There are dozens of ways one could handle many emotion-laden situations, so who should decide which is the emotionally intelligent way of doing things? Intrinsic to the four-branch model of emotional intelligence is the hypothesis that emotional skills cannot be separated from their social context. To use emotions in a useful way, one must be attuned to the social and cultural norms of the environment in which one interacts. Therefore, the model proposes that correct answers will depend highly upon agreement with others of one's own social group. Furthermore, experts on emotion research should also have the ability to identify correct answers, since scientific methods have provided us with good knowledge on correct alternatives to emotion-related problems.
Consequently, the MSCEIT is scored using two different methods: general consensus and expert scoring. In consensus scoring, an individual's answers are statistically compared with the answers that were provided by a diverse worldwide sample of 5,000 respondents aged 18 or older who completed the MSCEIT prior to May 2001. The sample is both educationally and ethnically diverse, with respondents from seven different countries including the United States.
In the consensus approach, greater statistical overlap with the sample's answers reflects higher emotional intelligence. In expert scoring, a person's answers are compared with those provided by a group of emotion experts, in this case 21 emotion investigators elected to the International Society for Research on Emotions (ISRE).
The amount of overlap between consensus and expert scoring has been carefully examined. Participants' responses have been scored first using the consensus method and then the expert method, and these results are then correlated with each other. The average correlation between the two sets of scores is greater than 0.90, indicating sizable overlap between the opinions of experts and the general consensus of test-takers. Laypeople and emotion experts, in other words, converge on the most "emotionally intelligent" answers. The scores of the experts tend to agree with one another more than do those of the consensus group, indicating that emotion experts are more likely to possess a shared social representation of what constitutes emotional intelligence.
The MSCEIT has demonstrated good reliability, meaning that scores tend to be consistent over time and that the test is internally consistent. In sum, given its modest overlap with commonly used tests of personality traits and analytic intelligence, the MSCEIT seems to test reliably for something that is distinct from both personality and IQ.
Putting Research to Work
Research on emotional intelligence has been put to practical use with unusual speed. The reason may be simple: Experiments suggest that scores on ability-based measures of emotional intelligence are associated with a number of important real-world outcomes.
Emotional intelligence may help one get along with peers and supervisors at work. Paulo N. Lopes of the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom spearheaded a study conducted at a Fortune 500 insurance company where employees worked in teams. Each team was asked to fill out surveys that asked individuals to rate other team members on personal descriptors related to emotions such as, "This person handles stress without getting too tense," or "This person is aware of the feelings of others."
Supervisors in the company were also asked to rate their subordinates on similar items. Everyone who participated in the study also took the MSCEIT. Although the sample of participants was small, employees who scored higher on the MSCEIT received more positive ratings from both their peers and their supervisors. Their peers reported having fewer conflicts with them, and they were perceived as creating a positive atmosphere at work. Supervisors rated their emotionally intelligent employees as more interpersonally sensitive, sociable, tolerant of stress and possessing more leadership potential. Higher scores were also positively associated with rank and salary in the company.
Emotional intelligence may also be important for creating and sustaining good relationships with peers. A different study conducted by Lopes and his collaborators asked German college students to keep diaries that described their everyday interactions with others over a two-week period. For every social interaction that lasted at least 10 minutes, students were asked to record the gender of the person they interacted with, how they felt about the interaction, how much they had wanted to make a certain impression, and to what extent they thought they succeeded in making that impression.
Scores on the using-emotions branch of the MSCEIT were positively related to how enjoyable and interesting students found their interactions to be, as well as how important and safe they felt during them. Scores on the managing-emotions branch seemed most important in interactions with the opposite sex. For these interactions, students scoring high on managing emotions reported more enjoyment, intimacy, interest, importance and respect. In addition, managing emotions was positively related to the students' beliefs that they had made the desired impression on their opposite-sex partners (coming across as friendly, say, or competent).
Brackett also investigated how scores on the MSCE1T relate to the quality of social relationships among college students. American college students completed the MSCEIT along with questionnaires assessing the quality of their friendships and their interpersonal skills. In addition, these students were asked to recruit two of their friends to evaluate the quality of their friendship. Individuals scoring high in managing emotions were rated as more caring and emotionally supportive by their friends. Scores on managing emotions were also negatively related to friends' reports of conflict with them. In another recent study by Nicole Lerner and Brackett, Yale students who scored higher in emotional intelligence were evaluated more positively by their roommates; that is, their roommates reported experiencing less conflict with them.
Emotional intelligence may also help people more successfully navigate their relationships with spouses and romantic partners. Another study headed by Brackett recruited 180 young couples (mean age 25 years) from the London area. The couples completed the MSCEIT and then filled out a variety of questionnaires asking about aspects of the couples' relationships, such as the quality of the interactions with their partners and how happy they were with the relationship. Happiness was correlated with high scores for both partners, and where one partner had a high score and the other a low score, satisfaction ratings tended to fall in the intermediate range.
The Future of Emotional Intelligence
Context plays an important role in shaping how these skills are put into action. We can all name people--certain notable politicians come to mind--who seem extremely talented in using their emotions in their professional lives while their personal lives seem in shambles. People may be more adept at using the skills of emotional intelligence in some situations than in others. A promising direction for future research is a focus on fluid skills rather than crystallized knowledge about emotions.
Although it has proved valuable so far as a test of general emotional intelligence, the MSCEIT requires refinement and improvement. We view the MEIS and the MSCEIT as the first in a potentially long line of improved ways of assessing emotional abilities.
We believe research on emotional intelligence will be especially valuable if focused on individual differences in emotional processes--a topic we hope will continue to generate more empirical interest. The science of emotion thus far has stressed principles of universality. Ekman's work on faces, mentioned above, and similar cross-cultural findings offer important insights into the nature of human emotional experience. However, in any given culture, people differ from one another in their abilities to interpret and use emotional information. Because individual deficits in emotional skills may lead to negative outcomes, anyone interested in improving emotional skills in various settings should focus on how and why some people, from childhood, are better at dealing with emotions than others. Such knowledge provides the hope of being able to successfully teach such skills to others.
The Popularization of "EQ"
Media interest in emotional intelligence was sparked by New York Times science writer Daniel Goleman's bestselling book Emotional Intelligence in 1995. In October of the same year came the TIME magazine cover and additional media coverage proclaiming emotional intelligence the new way to be smart and the best predictor of success in life.
The late 1990s provided the perfect cultural landscape for the appearance of emotional intelligence. The latest in a string of IQ controversies had broken out with the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which claimed that modern society has become increasingly stratified not by money, power or class, but by traditionally defined intelligence.
The Bell Curve was read as advocating a view that intelligence is the most important predictor of almost everything that seems to matter to most people: staying healthy, earning enough money, even having a successful marriage. Yet half the population, by definition, has below-average IQs; moreover, IQ is seen as difficult to change over one's lifespan. For many readers, The Bell Curve contained an extremely pessimistic message. As if to answer the growing fear that a relatively immutable IQ is the primary predictor of success in life, Goleman's book on emotional intelligence included the phrase, "Why it can matter more than IQ," right on the cover. The public responded favorably to this new promise, and the book soon became a staple on airport newsstands worldwide.
Skepticism over narrow definitions of the word "intelligence" resonated powerfully with a public that seemed to agree that something else--something more intangible--may more strongly determine the quality of one's life. Evidence that the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which is highly correlated with IQ, fails to predict academic success especially well beyond the first year of college continued to fuel interest in how emotional skills, or something else beside traditional intelligence, may more significantly determine one's future accomplishments. Americans have always prided themselves on a strong work ethic; the motto that "slow and steady wins the race" represents an attitude that fits well with public conceptions of emotional intelligence as a mark of good character. Americans also have a strong collective self-image of equality, which popular views of emotional intelligence support by characterizing success as dependent on a set of skills that anyone can learn.
Goleman's book continues to be one of the most successful and influential of its genre, and other trade books concerned with emotional intelligence (or EQ, as it is referred to in the popular literature) have appeared in recent years. More than just a passing fad, or temporary backlash against standardized testing, emotional intelligence has captured the long-term interest of employers and educators. In just a few years, what started as a somewhat obscure area of science-driven research in psychology burgeoned into a multi-million-dollar industry marketing books, tapes, seminars and training programs aimed at increasing emotional intelligence.
Popularization has in some cases distorted the original scientific definition of emotional intelligence. Many people now equate emotional intelligence with almost everything desirable in a person's makeup that cannot be measured by an IQ test, such as character, motivation, confidence, mental stability, optimism and "people skills." Research has shown that emotional skills may contribute to some of these qualities, but most of them move far beyond skill-based emotional intelligence. We prefer to define emotional intelligence as a specific set of skills that can be used for either prosocial or antisocial purposes. The ability to accurately perceive how others are feeling may be used by a therapist to gauge how best to help her clients, whereas a con artist might use it to manipulate potential victims. Being emotionally intelligent does not necessarily make one an ethical person.
Although popular claims regarding emotional intelligence run far ahead of what research can reasonably support, the overall effects of the publicity have been more beneficial than harmful. The most positive aspect of this popularization is a new and much needed emphasis on emotion by employers, educators and others interested in promoting social welfare. The popularization of emotional intelligence has helped both the public and research psychology reevaluate the functionality of emotions and how they serve humans adaptively in everyday life. Although the continuing popular appeal of emotional intelligence is both warranted and desirable, we hope that such attention will stimulate a greater interest in the scientific and scholarly study of emotion. It is our hope that in coming decades, advances in cognitive and affective science will offer intertwining perspectives from which to study how people navigate their lives. Emotional intelligence, with its focus on both head and heart, may adequately serve to point us in the right direction.
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Daisy Grewal is a doctoral student in the social psychology program at Yale University. She received her B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002 and her M.S. in psychology from Yale in 2004. Her research focuses on gender stereotypes and prejudice, particularly in organizational contexts. Peter Salovey, who earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1986, is Dean of Yale College and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology at Yale, where he directs the Health, Emotion, and Behavior Laboratory and holds additional professorships in management, epidemiology and public health, and social and policy studies. His research emphases are the psychological significance and function of mood and emotion, and the application of principles from social and personality psychology to promoting healthy behavior. Address for Salovey: Yale University, Department of Psychology, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520-8205. Internet for both: daisy.grewal@yale.edu, peter.salovey@yale.edu
percent finding correct solution
positive film 75%
neutral film 20%
facilitative display 83%
no manipulation 13%
Figure 6. Positive emotions can improve performance on a task. In a
Cornell University experiment, students were given a simple
problem-solving task after they had watched a comedy film or a neutral
film. The students who had viewed the comedy film had a much higher
success rate than those who had watched a neutral film or
seen no film. Viewing a comedy film was almost as "helpful" as a
display providing useful clues. (Data from Isen et al. 1987.)
Note: Table made from bar graph.
perceiving facilitating
faces pictures facilitation
perceiving faces 1.000#* 0.356* 0.300*
pictures 0.347# 1.000#* 0.288*
facilitation 0.340# 0.328# 1.000#*
facilitating sensations 0.336# 0.402# 0.352#
changes 0.225# 0.282# 0.255#
understanding blends 0.171# 0.260# 0.224#
emotion 0.232# 0.300# 0.299#
management
managing emotional 0.191# 0.275# 0.269#
relationships
facilitating understanding
sensations changes blends
perceiving faces 0.315* 0.191* 0.157*
pictures 0.400* 0.286* 0.263*
facilitation 0.313* 0.283* 0.242*
facilitating sensations 1.000#* 0.388* 0.374*
changes 0.382# 1.000#* 0.575*
understanding blends 0.375# 0.589# 1.000#*
emotion 0.395# 0.417# 0.416#
management
managing emotional 0.411# 0.395# 0.409#
relationships
managing
emotion emotional
management relationships
perceiving faces 0.191* 0.179*
pictures 0.282* 0.271*
facilitation 0.262* 0.262*
facilitating sensations 0.384* 0.415*
changes 0.437* 0.417*
understanding blends 0.425* 0.424*
emotion 1.000#* 0.542*
management
managing emotional 0.575# 1.000#*
relationships
Note: Expert opinion indicated with *, general consensus indicated
with #.
Copyright 2005 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society