Emotional intelligence

Emotional Intelligence, also called EI or EQ, describes an ability, capacity, or skill to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups. However, being a relatively new area, the definition of emotional intelligence is still in a state of flux. Some, such as Mayer prefer to distinguish emotional knowledge from emotional intelligence, as discussed below.

In 1920, E. L. Thorndike, at Columbia University,, used the term "social intelligence" to describe the skill of getting along with other people. In 1975, Howard Gardner's The Shattered Mind, began the formulation of the idea for "Multiple Intelligences" (he identifies eight intelligences), including both interpersonal intelligence and intrapersonal intelligence. Many psychologists, such as Gardner, believe that traditional measures of intelligence, such as the IQ test, fail to fully explain cognitive ability.

The term "emotional intelligence" appears to have originated with Wayne Payne, but was popularized by Daniel Goleman. The leading research on the concept originated with Peter Salovey and John "Jack" Mayer starting in the late 1980s. In 1990, their seminal paper defined the concept as an intelligence. Mayer and Salovey continue to research the concept, and created an emotional intelligence test called the MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test). The term "emotional quotient" seems to have originated in an article by Keith Beasley. Bar-on developed a test measuring emotional quotient, called the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi). There are numerous other assessments of emotional intelligence each advocating different models and measures.

Defining emotional intelligence
The distinction between intelligence and knowledge in the area of cognition (i.e. IQ) is very clear, where generally, psychological research demonstrates that IQ is a reliable measure of cognitive capacity, and is stable over time. In the area of emotion (i.e. EQ) that distinction between intelligence and knowledge is murky. Current definitions of EQ are inconsistent about what it measures: some say that EQ is dynamic, it can be learned or increased; whereas others (such as Mayers) say that EQ is stable, and cannot be increased. Mayer's is consistent with cognition-based definitions of intelligence and knowledge, stating that emotional "intelligence is unlikely to be any more easily raised than general intelligence," but "emotional knowledge can be increased. . . fairly easily." Under Mayer's definition, emotional knowledge would be the level of perception and assessment that an individual has of their emotions at any given moment in time.

Mayer and Salovey and emotional intelligence
In the early 1990s, John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey published a series of papers on emotional intelligence. They suggested that the capacity to perceive and understand emotions define a new variable in personality. The Mayer-Salovey model defines emotional intelligence as the capacity to understand emotional information and to reason with emotions. More specifically, they divide emotional intelligence abilities into four areas -- in their four branch model:


 * 1) The capacity to accurately perceive emotions.
 * 2) The capacity to use emotions to facilitate thinking.
 * 3) The capacity to understand emotional meanings.
 * 4) The capacity to manage emotions.

These four abilities are assessed by criterion-based (or abilities-based) tests (the researchers have introduced several versions, the latest of which is the MSCEIT V2.0).

Goleman and emotional intelligence
Daniel Goleman popularized his view of emotional intelligence in the 1995 best-selling book: Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Goleman generalized the Mayer/Salovey research and adapted it to a general public audience. In doing so, he altered the meaning of the term and added claims that the original theory never made. Goleman drew together research in neurophysiology, psychology and cognitive science. Much of his book is based on Mayer and Salovey's original 1990 article. However, he modified emotional intelligence as conceived by Mayer and Salovey with other observations based on other scientific findings, including:


 * A part of the human brain called the amygdala or reptilian brain (because it has similar functions to those of reptiles) does most of the processing of human emotional responses. These responses mostly occur automatically, as in the case of the familiar flight-or-attack response triggered by threatening situations. Humans have evolved in such a way that a neural hijack takes place that provides a quick answer to life's critical situations. This hijacking is said to happen because of raised stress levels (which affect heart rate, blood pressure, hearing problems, eye conditions, muscle tension, cholesterol levels and hormone secretion) causing the brain to start reacting to sensory information rather than concentrating on and understanding it in order to make conscious decisions.
 * In humans, the reptilian brain has links with the neocortex, which can accordingly exert some control over the largely automatic responses of the reptilian brain.
 * The amount of control has a genetic component; yet one can learn to control emotions to a certain degree. Most people do learn this at some point. Further, it is possible to hone the skill, achieving greater abilities to manage emotions. Therefore, Goleman believes that emotional intelligence is learnable.
 * Goleman points out there is not a strong correlation between the Intelligence quotient (IQ) and success in life. While popular opinion is that IQ predicts success, there is little conclusive evidence. There is research showing IQ is linked to completion of high school, attainment of higher education, avoidance of dependence on welfare, avoidance of criminal conviction, there is not proof that IQ predicts these outcomes. In 1995 Goleman asserted that EQ is the missing link; in the last 10 years researchers have found that emotional intelligence is an important predictor of grades, promotions, health, and relationship quality.

Goleman's popularized definition of emotional intelligence at first displaced the more careful scientific definition of Mayer and Salovey in the public imagination. However, recent interests have turned back, in part, toward Mayer and Salovey's definition, providing a compelling case for their conception. Nevertheless, Goleman brought attention to the fact that emotions play a crucial role in everyday life, and that so-called "normal" people can enhance their emotional competency. Many other books on emotional intelligence have appeared in the train of Goleman's work.

Goleman's five emotional competencies
Goleman divides emotional intelligence into the following five emotional competencies:
 * 1) The ability to identify and name one's emotional states and to understand the link between emotions, thought and action.
 * 2) The capacity to manage one's emotional states &mdash; to control emotions or to shift undesirable emotional states to more adequate ones.
 * 3) The ability to enter into emotional states (at will) associated with a drive to achieve and be successful.
 * 4) The capacity to read, be sensitive to, and influence other people's emotions.
 * 5) The ability to enter and sustain satisfactory interpersonal relationships.

In Goleman's view, these emotional competencies build on each other in a hierarchy. At the bottom of his hierarchy "1" is the ability to identity one's emotional state. Some knowledge of "competency 1" is needed to move to the next competency. Likewise, knowledge and/or skill in the first three competencies is needed to read and influence positively other people's emotions ("competency 4"). The first four competencies lead to increased ability to enter and sustain good relationships ("competency 5").

Goleman observes that emotions always exist &mdash; we always feel something. Organizations of all kinds often prize "being rational", whereas they do not esteem "being emotional." But even in the most "rational" of decisions, emotions persist: how else do we decide which criteria to use for evaluating the options in making a decision? &mdash; pace experience and statistical probabilities. Emotions also play a role in making a final decision between equally good choices &mdash; pace random chance. Goleman also laments gender role idiosyncrasies: Western society usually sees it as acceptable for women to show their emotions, but not for men.

Measures of Emotional Intelligence
Some researchers believe EI is a cognitive ability just as is IQ (eg, Mayer & Salovey, 2000), while others believe it is a combination of perceived abilities and traits (e.g., Schutte et al. 1998; Bar-On, 1997). These opposing views have inspired two separate domains of inventories – ability-based measures, which focus on maximal performance, and mixed-model measures, which focus on typical performance (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2000; Petrides & Furnham, 2000). Maximal performance is an indication of the best cognitive performance a test-taker can achieve on a test, while typical performance indicates a test-taker’s performance under ordinary test conditions (Dennis, Sternberg, & Beatty, 2000).

Ability-based measures of EI
The MSCEIT measure is an ‘objective’ measure of EI involving a series of emotion-based problem solving items with relatively low face-validity, of which the answers have been deemed correct by consensus (MacCann, Roberts, Matthews, & Zeidner, 2004; Roberts, Zeidner, & Matthews, 2001). The MSCEIT purports to measure emotional intelligence across the following domains:


 * Experiential Area
 * Perceiving Emotions Branch
 * Facilitating Thinking Branch
 * Strategic Area
 * Understanding Emotional Meaning Branch
 * Managing Emotions Branch

For more on this topic see psychological testing and evaluation. A discussion on the strengths of ability-based measures versus self-report measures was written by.

Self-report measures of EI
Bradberry and Greaves, based on the work of Goleman, give the following four areas as significant for measuring emotional knowledge. Their test, The Emotional Intelligence Appraisal is a self-administered, online assessment that is included in their book The Emotional Intelligence Quickbook. Emotional Intelligence Appraisal
 * Personal competence, including:
 * Self-awareness: Only when somebody is aware of their strengths and weaknesses can they maximise their potential.
 * Self-management: Using awareness of your emotions to manage your response to different situations and people.
 * Social competence, including:
 * Social awareness: Understanding the perspectives of other people including their motivations, their emotions, and the meaning of what they do and say.
 * Relationship Management: Using awareness of one's own emotions and the emotions of others to manage relationships to a successful outcome.

Nancy Gibbs on emotional intelligence
In October of 1995, Nancy Gibbs wrote an article on emotional intelligence that appeared in Time Magazine, wherein she mentioned Goleman's book, adding to the book's popularity, but misrepresented Mayer and Salovey's view. In the misquotation, "Their [Mayer and Salovey's] notion is about to bound into the national conversation, handily shortened to EQ, thanks to a new book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam) by Daniel Goleman...", Nancy Gibbs made it look like Goleman's book accurately reflected Mayer and Salovey's concept of emotional intelligence without even mentioning the main differences.

John Mayer criticized Gibb's article on his Web site at the University of New Hampshire. Among other things, he criticized the subtitle on the issue's cover ("It's not your IQ. Its not even a number. But emotional intelligence may be the best predictor of success in life, redefining what it means to be smart."), because the subtitle makes the reader think that emotional intelligence is not measurable and that emotional intelligence correlates with "success in life." Mayer and Salovey's view, to the contrary, states that EI is measurable, even with a psychometric test such as the MSCEIT, and makes no claim about EIs predictability for success in life.

Criticisms
A significant criticism is that emotional intelligence has no "benchmark" to set itself against. While IQ tests are designed to correlate as closely as possible with school grades, emotional intelligence seems to have no similar objective quantity it can be based on.

The criticism of the works of Mayer and Salovey include a study by Roberts et.al. . That research warns that EQ may actually be measuring conformity. However, Mayer et.al. , provide further theoretical basis for their theories. Nevertheless, many psychological researchers do not accept emotional intelligence to be a part of "standard" intelligence (like IQ).

Goleman's work is also criticized in the psychological community. Eysenck, for example comments that Goleman "exemplifies more clearly than most the fundamental absurdity of the tendency to class almost any type of behaviour as an 'intelligence'. . . .If these five 'abilities' define 'emotional intelligence', we would expect some evidence that they are highly correlated; Goleman admits that they might be quite uncorrelated, and in any case if we cannot measure them, how do we know they are related? So the whole theory is built on quicksand; there is no sound scientific basis."

Self-report EI merely another measure of Personality?
Some researchers have raised concerns with the extent to which self-report EI measures correlate with established personality dimensions such as those within the Big Five (Gignac, 2005; Malouff, Thorsteinsson, & Schutte, 2005). Generally, self-report EI measures and personality measures have been said to converge because they both purport to measure traits, and because they are both measured in the self-report form (Zeidner, Matthews, & Roberts, 2002). Specifically, there appear to be two dimensions of the Big Five that stand out as most related to self-report EI – neuroticism and extraversion. In particular, neuroticism has been said to relate to negative emotionality and anxiety (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Intuitively, individuals scoring high on neuroticism are likely to score low on self-report EI measures (Zeidner, Matthews, & Roberts, 2002). While many studies have looked at the relationship between neuroticism and self-report EI measures, few have examined that relationship with the TMMS and SEI specifically (Gignac, Palmer, Manocha, & Stough, in press). A study by Davies, Stankov, and Roberts (1998) reported a strong negative correlation between total TMMS scores and neuroticism scores (r = -.40). Another study by Warrick and Nettlebeck (2004) reported a moderate negative correlation between neuroticism and the TMMS total score (-.27), although there was a notable limitation in their sample size (n = 84). As for the SEI, an initial study by Schutte et al. (1998) reported a moderate negative correlation between neuroticism and total SEI scores (r = -.28), although the sample size was also notably small (n = 23). In a larger study (n = 354) by Saklofske (2003), the SEI optimism subscale was reported to have a strong negative relationship with neuroticism (r = -.52). Collectively, there does appear to be evidence of an overlap between neuroticism and self-report EI measures such as the TMMS and SEI. However, it is unclear in the literature exactly what level of correlation between personality and self-report EI is so high as to suggest that it self-report EI is redundant.

The interpretations of moderate-to-high correlations between self-report EI and personality have been varied and inconsistent. Some researchers have asserted that correlations in the .40 range constitute outright construct redundancy (eg, Davies, Stankov & Roberts, 1998), while others have suggested that self-report EI is a personality trait in itself (eg, Petrides & Furnham, 2001). Gignac (2005) asserted that it would be difficult for any self-report individual difference measure to demonstrate exceptional incremental validity above and beyond the Big Five, and recommended that factor analytic methodology be used to test for construct redundancy (as opposed to zero-order correlations). Before conclusive and convincing arguments can be asserted as to whether self-report EI is redundant or related to personality, it would be useful to statistically extricate the effects of neuroticism from the relationship between the TMMS and SEI, and determine whether the EI subscales still form a general factor (EI g) after the extrication. While the overlap between EI and personality is a large concern, there are other factors that bring the psychometric properties of self-report EI inventories into question.

Self-report EI - Susceptibility to Faking Good
Self-report EI measures, much like personality measures, are comprised of highly face-valid items. This may make understanding what test items are ‘really asking’ routinely easy, and could expose the inventories to a phenomenon known as “faking good.” More formally termed socially desirable responding (SDR), “faking good” is defined as a response pattern where test-takers systematically represent themselves with an excessive positive bias (Paulhus, 2002). This bias has long been known to contaminate responses on personality inventories (Holtgraves, 2004; McFarland & Ryan, 2000; Peebles & Moore, 1998; Nichols & Greene, 1997; Zerbe & Paulhus, 1987), and act as a mediator of the relationships between self-report measures (Nichols & Greene, 1997; Ganster et al., 1983).

It has been suggested that responding in a desirable way is a response set, which is a situational and temporary response pattern (Pauls & Crost, 2004; Paulhus, 1991). This is contrasted with a response style, which is a more long-term trait-like quality. Considering the contexts certain self-report EI inventories are used in (eg, employment settings), the problems of response sets in high-stakes scenarios become clear (Paulhus & Reid, 2001). Highlighting the extent to which response biases are considered a confound to accurate personality measurement, some researchers even believe it is necessary to warn test-takers not to fake good before taking a personality test (e.g., McFarland, 2003). In summary, given the inherent similarities between personality testing and self-report EI testing (both are self-report, both measure traits, and both are said to converge moderately-to-highly), it may be reasonable to assert that socially desirable responding has the capacity to contaminate responses on self-report EI measures. Specifically, should self-report EI measures be largely contaminated by SDR, their construct validity may be compromised (Cronbach & Meehl, 1996).

Ability-based models
Ability-based models (eg., Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, Emotional Intelligence Test; MSCEIT, Mayer et al., 2000) are ‘objective’ measures involving a series of emotional problem solving items with relatively low face-validity, of which the answers have been deemed correct by consensus (MacCann, Roberts, Matthews, & Zeidner, 2004; Roberts, Zeidner, & Matthews, 2001). This approach is regarded by the authors and its proponents to be somewhat of a ‘gold-standard’ measure of EI, since it relies on directly measured EI rather than self-reports of it (MacCann, Matthews, Zeidner, & Roberts, 2004; Caruso, Mayer, & Salovey, 2002; Mayer & Salovey, 2000). This method, however, has some notable downfalls. Petrides & Furnham, (2000) noted that, independent of inter-rater reliability, determining item ‘correctness’ for emotion-based items is greatly problematic as there are no objective criteria to refer to. Additionally, the administration of the MSCEIT (Mayer et al., 2000) is time consuming at best (up to 45 minutes) – a luxury not often available in applied settings. Conversely, self-report measures of EI are relatively quick to administer and are highly face-valid.