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Emotional Intelligence (EI), often measured as an Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ), describes an ability, capacity, or skill to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups. As a relatively new area of psychological research, the definition of EI is constantly changing.

Origins of the term
In 1920, E. L. Thorndike, at Columbia University,, used the term social intelligence to describe the skill of understanding and managing other people. In 1975, Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences introduced the idea of Multiple Intelligences (he identifies eight intelligences, later two more are added), which included both interpersonal intelligence and intrapersonal intelligence. Psychologists such as Gardner believe that traditional types intelligence, such as IQ, fail to fully explain cognitive ability. The term emotional intelligence appears to have originated with Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, which speculated about a broader emotional social intelligence necessary for human survival and adaptation (Bar-On, 2005). In modern times, the term EI was popularized by Daniel Goleman, who published several books and articles describing EI and its application to business. As is the case in so many fields, language is a primary cause for bias when it comes to determining a subject's origin or history. Payne may have been the first to coin the phrase for the Anglo-Saxon world, but, historically, he was preceded 20 years by Carl Lans, a Dutch science fiction writer of the early 1960s. In two novels, Lans elaborates on the concepts underlying EI, even using the phrase Emotional Quotient. These books were never translated, but they formed the base of an immensely popular radio show.

The scientific use of the term emotional quotient seems to have originated in an article by Keith Beasley. Subsequent research into EI began in the late 1980's with Peter Salovey and John "Jack" Mayer. Their seminal paper explicitly defined EI as a type of intelligence. Salovey and Mayer continue to research EI today. There are numerous other models of emotional intelligence, each of which uses different assessment measures.

1995 Time magazine article
Nancy Gibbs' 1995 Time magazine article highlighted Goleman's book and was the first in a string of mainstream media interest in emotional intelligence.

Defining emotional intelligence
There are many models of emotional intelligence that identify different components or core competencies. Popular models have become associated with different assessments discussed below. Some of these include:


 * The Goleman model (associated with the ECI assessment).
 * The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso ability model (associated with the MSCEIT assessment).
 * The Trait Emotional Intelligence model is associated with the open-access TEIQ assessments.
 * The Bar-On model (associated with the EQ-i assessment).

Measures of emotional intelligence
Some researchers believe that EI is a cognitive ability similar to IQ (e.g., Mayer & Salovey, 2000), others believe that it is a combination of perceived abilities and traits (e.g., Petrides, Furnham, Mavroveli, 2007), while others consider it to be a quantifiable skill. Different models of EI have led to the use of a variety of techniques used to assess EI. While some of these measures might overlap, most researchers agree that they tap slightly different constructs.

Self-report measures of EI (Trait EI)
The leading scientific theory of emotional intelligence based on self-report is trait emotional intelligence theory. There are, however, many self-report measures of EI, including the EQi, the Swinburne University Emotional Intelligence Test (SUEIT), the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment (SEI), the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT), the ECI, the Ei360, a test by Tett, Fox, and Wang, and Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) which is open-access and is available in 15 languages. Some of these inventories, such as the Ei360, also include sections for informant-reports in order to validate the self-reported responses.

The Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (Schutte et al., 1998), a publicly printed behavior inventory, was one of the earliest measures to assess EI. It is one of the only inventories based on Salovey and Mayer's (1990) four-branch model, and it has been outdated by more recent EI inventories.

Responses to the SEI are statistically reliable, and scores on the SEI predict 55% of the variance of a combination of quality of life, relationship effectiveness, health, and personal effectiveness (based on forward stepwise regression with self-reported outcomes, see the white paper. "Emotional Intelligence and Success"). Responses to the SEI can be used to create a detailed report, which is over 20 pages long, and includes at least 16 specific methods to improve EI.

Ability-based measures of EI (Ability EI)
The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) is a measure of EI involving a series of emotion-based problem solving items. Consistent with Mayer and colleagues' notion of EI as a type of intelligence, the test is modeled off of ability-based IQ tests. Consequently, it has high face validity in reference to some conceptions of EI but not to others.

Due to the non-objective nature of its items, correct answers on the MSCEIT have been determined by the consensus of experts and of a large standardized sample of 5000 (MacCann, Roberts, Matthews, & Zeidner, 2004; Roberts, Zeidner, & Matthews, 2001). The MSCEIT allows responses to be scored using either the experts' consensus or the large sample's (responses scored using each of these techniques will strongly correlate with each other, however both options are supplied due to theoretical disagreements about consensus based assessment).

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, Consensus based assessment and evaluation. A discussion on the strengths of ability-based measures versus self-report measures was written by. Serious conceptual and psychometric problems with scoring procedures used in the MSCEIT have been frequently highlighted in the literature (see, for example, Brody, 2004).

Alexithymia and low EI
Alexithymia from the Greek words λεξις and θυμος (literally "without words for emotions") is a term coined by Peter Sifneos in 1973 to describe people who appeared to have deficiencies in understanding, processing, or describing their emotions. Viewed as a spectrum between high and low EI, the alexithymia construct is strongly inversely related to emotional intelligence, representing the lower range of EI. The individual's level of alexithymia can be measured with self-scored questionnaires such as the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) or the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ) or by observer rated measures such as the Observer Alexithymia Scale (OAS).

Criticisms
Emotional intelligence is not yet widely accepted as a type of intelligence. In comparison to EI, measures of IQ provide some of the best predictors in modern psychology research, strongly correlating with variables such as school grades, and, more recently, the psychometric g factor. Across the various models of EI, researchers have proposed various, albeit controversial, criteria, in order to establish EI as a type of intelligence, or at least as a useful construct. Nonetheless, empirical studies of EI have raised doubt as to whether some of the models of EI meet these criteria.

Among others, Goleman's work has been criticized in areas of the psychological community for beginning with the assumption that EI is a type of intelligence, rather than persuasively arguing that EI is a type of intelligence. Eysenck writes that Goleman's description of EI contains unsubstantiated assumptions about intelligence in general, and that it even runs contrary to what researchers have come to expect when studying types of intelligence.

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.

Criticism of Mayer and Salovey's model
One criticism of the works of Mayer and Salovey comes from a study by Roberts et.al. , which suggests that the EI, as measured by the MSCEIT, may only be measuring conformity. This argument is rooted in the MSCEIT's use of consensus-based assessment, and in the fact that scores on the MSCEIT are negatively distributed (meaning that its scores differentiate between people with low EI better than people with high EI).

Further concerted criticisms have been offered by Brody (2004), Landy (2005), Petrides, Furnham, and Mavroveli (2007), and Waterhouse (2006). Overall, there has been little acceptance of EI as a mental ability in the scientific literature.

Claims for the predictive power of emotional intelligence are too extreme
It has been argued that Goleman has made unproven claims for the power of emotional intelligence to predict skills necessary for socializing, working, and leadership. Again, members of the academic community took issue with these statements (Antonakis, 2003 & 2004).

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, while new considerations of the comparison of personality to emotional intelligence suggest they are separate constructs (Bradberry, 2007). 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).

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 (e.g., Davies, Stankov & Roberts, 1998), while others have suggested that self-report EI is a personality trait in itself (e.g., 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 control (see controlling for a variable) for neuroticism when determining the relationship between scores on self-report EI scales and other variables.

Self-report EI - susceptibility to faking good
More formally termed socially desirable responding (SDR), faking good is defined as a response pattern in which 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), acting 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 some self-report EI inventories are used in (e.g., employment settings), the problems of response sets in high-stakes scenarios become clear (Paulhus & Reid, 2001). There are a few methods to prevent socially desirable responding on behavior inventories. Some researchers believe it is necessary to warn test-takers not to fake good before taking a personality test (e.g., McFarland, 2003). Some inventories use validity scales in order to determine the likelihood or consistency of the responses across all items.

Ones, Viswesvaran, & Reiss (1996) provide a conclusive evidence and a thorough discussion of why social desirability does not compromise the validity of self-report tests in selection settings.

Corporate uses and misuses of EI testing
Whenever it is proposed to use a new assessment tool for hiring practices, there is the worry that it might create unfair job discrimination. Regarding EI, Goleman (1995) and Mayer's (1990) suggestions that EI is a key working skill are not widely enough accepted. Consequently, using EI scores as a standard for hiring employees might arbitrarily discriminate against individuals with low EI.

How to choose an EQ test
There are many dozens of EQ tests in the market, most of them marketed by commercial organizations and consultancies. Fewer than a handful are underpinned by genuine research programes. The best way to establish if an EQ test is genuine is to carry out a literature search in a scientific database (e.g., Web of Knowledge or PsycInfo) under the name of the test developer.