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Psychology
The question of whether ability-related emotional intelligence (ability EI) predicts important life outcomes has attracted considerably more attention than the question of what ability EI consists of. The authors draw from the attitude and emotion literatures to suggest that the evaluation dimension of meaning is likely key in understanding how ability EI operates. Measures of ability EI predict the extent to which individuals can accurately evaluate words and measures of the latter type act as emotional intelligence measures.
- emotional intelligence
- ability
- evaluation
1. Introduction
Relative to the intelligence literature, the emotional intelligence literature has a shorter history. The construct was formally proposed in 1990, popularized in 1995, and redefined in 1997, as reviewed by Barchard et al. (2016). Emotional intelligence (EI) can be assessed in trait-related terms (i.e., as a set of personality traits) or it can be assessed through the use of ability-related tests such as the MSCEIT (Mayer et al. 2003), the STEU and the STEM (MacCann and Roberts 2008), or the NEAT (Krishnakumar et al. 2016). Trait-related and ability-related tests of EI do not correlate very highly with each other (Brackett et al. 2006; Joseph and Newman 2010) and the focus of the present paper primarily concerns ability-related conceptions (Mayer et al. 2008).
In addition to psychometric considerations, researchers have asked questions such as whether individual differences in ability-related emotional intelligence (ability EI) matter with respect to important life outcomes. Several papers link ability EI to social functioning, though relevant findings seem to depend on one branch of EI (management) and do not appear to be fully consistent across studies (Lopes et al. 2004; Lopes et al. 2011). There is some link between ability EI and outcomes such as health (Martins et al. 2010) and well-being (Sánchez-Álvarez et al. 2016), though these relationships are modest (in the .20 range) and often do not replicate (e.g., Di Fabio and Kenny 2016). Ability EI has been linked to better academic performance, though the magnitude of this relationship is modest and may be particularly evident in humanities courses (MacCann et al. 2020b). Links between ability EI and work-related behaviors or performance are often not significant when controlling for personality and cognitive ability (Miao et al. 2017; O’Boyle et al. 2011). These findings have been characterized as disappointing by some commentators (Matthews et al. 2012; Ybarra et al. 2014) and even advocates of ability EI have suggested that relationships between ability EI and behaviors or performance could be complicated (Joseph and Newman 2010; Mayer et al. 2016).
One important development in intelligence research occurred when researchers began focusing on how variations in intelligence operate—namely, how they manifest themselves in stimulus processing and reactivity (Jensen 2006). Given the state of the ability EI literature, similar directions can be advocated (Fiori 2009; Miners et al. 2018). Several lines of research hint at what this next generation of ability EI research might look like. MacCann et al. (2011) found that participants with higher levels of ability EI engaged in problem-focused coping to a greater extent and this difference in coping strategies explained a portion of the link between ability EI and grade point averages. Megías-Robles et al. (2019) found that individual differences in ability EI mattered for emotion regulation strategies, with participants with high EI more likely to engage in reappraisal and participants with low EI more likely to engage in suppression. A line of research indicates that ability-related variations in EI, but not trait EI, facilitates cognitive control within tasks that involve emotional processing (Checa and Fernández-Berrocal 2019; Gutiérrez-Cobo et al. 2017).
2. Evaluation’s Centrality to Affective and Emotional Meaning
Emotional intelligence can be defined in terms of abilities related to the identification, expression, understanding, management, and use of emotions (Kotsou et al. 2019). Although definitions such as these emphasize real-world emotional phenomena, assessments of ability EI concentrate on varieties of emotion-related knowledge, typically in the absence of emotional experiences. Much of this knowledge is likely to be evaluative in nature. For example, one must evaluate the situations of the STEU (MacCann and Roberts 2008) or the NEAT (Krishnakumar et al. 2016) to make accurate inferences concerning the emotions that characters would experience. Evaluative meaning is core to many of the answer options that test-takers are presented with, which often consist of emotion words (e.g., sad, grateful, angry). When simpler stimuli such as landscapes or art images are presented (Mayer et al. 2003), these stimuli must also be evaluated in order for the test-taker to provide accurate answers. Participants who are more inclined to evaluate the objects that they are exposed to may typically receive higher scores on ability EI tests, provided that their evaluations accord with other test-takers (or experts) to any extent. Ability EI tests certainly assess things beyond evaluative knowledge, but the possession and use of such knowledge may be key.
This point was repeatedly made by Osgood and colleagues, who asked participants to characterize numerous concepts and stimuli in terms of semantic contrasts such as good–bad, weak–strong, hard–soft, and so on (Osgood 1962). Factor analyses of these ratings reveal that the connotative space of meaning is (universally) anchored by three dimensions termed evaluation (is the stimulus good, bad, or in between?); potency (is the stimulus strong, weak, or in between?); and activity (is the stimulus active, passive, or in between?). Evaluation is the first factor of this space, meaning that the most robust distinctions are made with respect to the evaluative dimension of meaning relative to the other two dimensions (Osgood et al. 1957).
Evaluations are certainly central to emotion. All appraisal theories of emotion posit that appraisals related to evaluation (e.g., is this situation pleasant or unpleasant?) shape emotional reactions (Roseman and Smith 2001) and the “pleasantness check” is thought to occur early in the emotion generation process (Scherer 2009).
Our analysis will emphasize the close affinity that exists between the attitude and emotion literatures (Cacioppo et al. 1997), given that attitudes are, at their core, evaluations of stimuli, whether concrete objects or values or ideas (Eagly and Chaiken 1993). Attitudes are thought to structure the environment, meaning that a person without strong or retrievable attitudes would experience difficulties knowing how to relate to what they encounter (Lewin 1935). In a compelling line of research supporting this point, Fazio and colleagues show that accessible (easy to retrieve) attitudes guide attention (Roskos-Ewoldsen and Fazio 1992), ease decision-making (Fazio et al. 1992), reduce stress (Fazio and Powell 1997), and render it more likely that the person acts in a manner consistent with their attitudes (Fazio and Williams 1986).
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/jintelligence11060125
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