Emotional intelligence is a set of
abilities which can be measured. Our approach
is ability-based and customized. We measure emotional intelligence with the - MSCEIT and customize our recommendations to meet individual and organization needs.
Different Methods of Measuring Emotional Intelligence
Measures of emotional intelligence are available to help you better understand your
own, your organizational members or your clients emotional strengths and weaknesses.
To evaluate emotional intelligence tests, you need to know two things:
1) how does the test define
emotional intelligence,
(How do the authors of the test define
emotional intelligence?" Do the test authors view emotional
intelligence as a collection of personality traits? As a set of
unrelated competencies? Or, as a unique set of mental
abilities?)
2) how does it test it.
(How is the test constructed?)
Self Report
Some tests use a self-report method. Self-report is the most common way to measure things such as personality traits.
Personality traits include warmth, empathy, anxiety and so on. Here is an example of a self-report test of personality:
- I often worry for no reason at all.
- It's hard to fall asleep at night.
- I feel down and blue a lot.
Self-report tests have been around for decades and they serve a very useful purpose.
As a way to measure emotional intelligence abilities, they have some drawbacks. For instance, this approach is
akin to asking you a series of questions about your intelligence:
- I am very smart.
- I am good at solving problems.
- I have a large vocabulary.
This would be a great test of what you thought of your intelligence, and could
be a measure of your self-image, but it is not the way to measure skills.
Does this mean that self-report measures of emotional intelligence should not be used? If you are trying to measure
emotional intelligence as a set of abilities, skills or emotional competencies, then self-report may not be the
best method to use. On the other hand if you are interested in
people's self-perceptions than this may be the preferred
approach. The best test to measure emotional and social
competencies may be the
BarOn EQi.
Other Report
If emotional intelligence is all about "people skills", why not ask other people what they think
about an individual's abilities?
On the face of it, this seems to be a legitimate means of testing emotional intelligence. But let's take a closer
look at this method, called Observer Ratings, and in human resources, 360-Degree Assessment.
Observers, let's say team members, are given a form to complete about you. Here are some examples of questions
that they may be asked:
- Is able to read people well.
- Manages emotions effectively.
- Understands my emotions.
But these ratings of your behavior are based upon their own observations, as well as their own biases. Some observers
may have an ax to grind, and give you uniformly low ratings. Or, if the observers work for you, they may not tell
you, even anonymously, that they think your leadership style is atrocious.
More importantly, would we ask a group of people to measure our intelligence? Probably not. Recent research indicates
that raters are least accurate at judging other people's mental abilities. That makes sense, because mental abilities
are often private and unobservable. Moreover, a very intelligent strategy may sometimes look as if it lacks street
smarts to people who just aren't able to fully comprehend it.
360-Degree assessments always have an appeal an interest to
those who are being assessed, but they are not the best way to
assess emotional intelligence abilities.
Ability Tests
We saved the best for last. How you determine whether you are or
are not emotionally intelligent is by testing your directly testing your
skills!
If you want to know if you can type, you take a typing test. A typing test does not ask you how
fast you are, it does not ask a friend how fast you can type. It requires you to type
and it measures your speed and accuracy.
The Mayer-Salovey ability model of emotional intelligence defines emotional intelligence as a set of skills or
abilities. These skills can be measured just like other skills or other abilities. An emotional intelligence ability
test may have questions such as this:
A manager gives an employee unexpected negative feedback in front of other team members. How is the employee likely
to feel?
Angry Sad Accepting Happy
What is the correct answer? Is there a correct answer? There are three ways we have found to score such ability
tests: expert, target and consensus.
Expert scoring employs the answers of emotional experts. They simply define
the "correct" answer, based upon their analysis of the test items and answers.
Target scoring asks the person experiencing a situation how they are feeling. For example, in an ability test consisting
of facial expressions, the test developer would take a person's picture and then ask them how they were feeling
at the time the picture is taken (using a detailed emotion rating scale).
The third method to score ability-based measures of emotional intelligence is to use what is called the consensus
method. If people recognize a facial expression as indicating fear, then that qualifies as expressing fear. Consensus
works because emotions convey important information, information that even has a survival value. As Darwin's research
indicated, there is even consensus of emotional expression across different species, allowing us to correctly recognize
anger in a cat, a dog, and in humans.
One of our research findings (Mayer, Caruso, & Salovey, 1999) is that these three methods - expert, target,
consensus - generally agree with one another. This means that there are answers which are more correct than others
in such ability tests.
Ability tests of emotional intelligence are new. They yield important information about skills which have not previously
been defined or measured.
