Evaluation’s Centrality to Affective and Emotional Meaning: History
View Latest Version
Please note this is an old version of this entry, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Contributor:
Michael D. Robinson
,
Muhammad R. Asad
,
Roberta L. Irvin

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).
One 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

References

  1. Barchard, Kimberly A., Marc A. Brackett, and José M. Mestre. 2016. Taking stock and moving forward: 25 years of emotional intelligence research. Emotion Review 8: 289.
  2. Mayer, John D., Peter Salovey, David R. Caruso, and Gill Sitarenios. 2003. Measuring emotional intelligence with the MSCEIT V2.0. Emotion 3: 97–105.
  3. MacCann, Carolyn, and Richard D. Roberts. 2008. New paradigms for assessing emotional intelligence: Theory and data. Emotion 8: 540–51.
  4. Krishnakumar, Sukumarakurup, Kay Hopkins, Joseph G. Szmerekovsky, and Michael D. Robinson. 2016. Assessing workplace emotional intelligence: Development and validation of an ability-based measure. The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied 150: 371–404.
  5. Brackett, Marc A., Susan E. Rivers, Sara Shiffman, Nicole Lerner, and Peter Salovey. 2006. Relating emotional ability to social functioning: A comparison of self-report and performance measures of emotional intelligence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91: 780–95.
  6. Joseph, Dana L., and Daniel A. Newman. 2010. Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. Journal of Applied Psychology 95: 54–78.
  7. Mayer, John D., Peter Salovey, and David R. Caruso. 2008. Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits? American Psychologist 63: 503–17.
  8. Lopes, Paulo N., Marc A. Brackett, John B. Nezlek, Astrid Schütz, Ina Sellin, and Peter Salovey. 2004. Emotional intelligence and social interaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30: 1018–34.
  9. Lopes, Paulo N., John B. Nezlek, Natalio Extremera, Janine Hertel, Pablo Fernández-Berrocal, Astrid Schütz, and Peter Salovey. 2011. Emotion regulation and the quality of social interaction: Does the ability to evaluate emotional situations and identify effective responses matter? Journal of Personality 79: 429–67.
  10. Martins, Alexandra, Nelson Ramalho, and Estelle Morin. 2010. A comprehensive meta-analysis of the relationship between emotional intelligence and health. Personality and Individual Differences 49: 554–64.
  11. Sánchez-Álvarez, Nicolás, Natalio Extremera, and Pablo Fernández-Berrocal. 2016. The relation between emotional intelligence and subjective well-being: A meta-analytic investigation. The Journal of Positive Psychology 11: 276–85.
  12. Di Fabio, Annamaria, and Maureen E. Kenny. 2016. Promoting well-being: The contribution of emotional intelligence. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 1182.
  13. MacCann, Carolyn, Yixin Jiang, Luke E. R. Brown, Kit S. Double, Micaela Bucich, and Amirali Minbashian. 2020b. Emotional intelligence predicts academic performance: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 146: 150–86.
  14. Miao, Chao, Ronald H. Humphrey, and Shanshan Qian. 2017. Are the emotionally intelligence good citizens or counterproductive? A meta-analysis of emotional intelligence and its relationships with organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior. Personality and Individual Differences 116: 144–56.
  15. O’Boyle, Ernest H., Jr., Ronald H. Humphrey, Jeffrey M. Pollack, Thomas H. Hawver, and Paul A. Story. 2011. The relation between emotional intelligence and job performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior 32: 788–818.
  16. Matthews, Gerald, Moshe Zeidner, and Richard D. Roberts. 2012. Emotional intelligence: A promise unfulfilled? Japanese Psychological Research 54: 105–27.
  17. Ybarra, Oscar, Ethan Kross, and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks. 2014. The ‘big idea’ that is yet to be: Toward a more motivated, contextual, and dynamic model of emotional intelligence. The Academy of Management Perspectives 28: 93–107.
  18. Mayer, John D., David R. Caruso, and Peter Salovey. 2016. The ability model of emotional intelligence: Principles and updates. Emotion Review 8: 290–300.
  19. Jensen, Arthur R. 2006. Clocking the Mind: Mental Chronometer Individual Differences. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  20. Fiori, Marina. 2009. A new look at emotional intelligence: A dual-process framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review 13: 21–44.
  21. Miners, Christopher T. H., Stéphane Côté, and Filip Lievens. 2018. Assessing the validity of emotional intelligence measures. Emotion Review 10: 87–95.
  22. MacCann, Carolyn, Gerard J. Fogarty, Moshe Zeidner, and Richard D. Roberts. 2011. Coping mediates the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and academic achievement. Contemporary Educational Psychology 36: 60–70.
  23. Megías-Robles, Alberto, María José Gutiérrez-Cobo, Raquel Gómez-Leal, Rosario Cabello, James J. Gross, and Pablo Fernández-Berrocal. 2019. Emotionally intelligent people reappraise rather than suppress their emotions. PLoS ONE 14: e0220688.
  24. Checa, Purificación, and Pablo Fernández-Berrocal. 2019. Cognitive control and emotional intelligence: Effect of the emotional content of the task. Frontiers in Psychology 10: 195.
  25. Gutiérrez-Cobo, María J., Rosario Cabello, and Pablo Fernández-Berrocal. 2017. The three models of emotional intelligence and performance in a hot and cool go/no-go task in undergraduate students. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 11: 33.
  26. Kotsou, Ilios, Moïra Mikolajczak, Alexandre Heeren, Jacques Grégoire, and Christophe Leys. 2019. Improving emotional intelligence: A systematic review of existing work and future challenges. Emotion Review 11: 151–65.
  27. Osgood, Charles E. 1962. Studies on the generality of affective meaning systems. American Psychologist 17: 10–28.
  28. Osgood, Charles E., George J. Suci, and Percy H. Tannenbaum. 1957. The Measurement of Meaning. Oxford: University of Illinois Press.
  29. Roseman, Ira J., and Craig A. Smith. 2001. Appraisal theory: Overview, assumptions, varieties, controversies. In Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. Edited by Klaus R. Scherer, Angela Schorr and Tom Johnstone. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–19.
  30. Scherer, Klaus R. 2009. The dynamic architecture of emotion: Evidence for the component process model. Cognition and Emotion 23: 1307–51.
  31. Cacioppo, John T., Wendi L. Gardner, and Gary G. Berntson. 1997. Beyond bipolar conceptualizations and measures: The case of attitudes and evaluative space. Personality and Social Psychology Review 1: 3–25.
  32. Eagly, Alice H., and Shelly Chaiken. 1993. The Psychology of Attitudes. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
  33. Lewin, Kurt. 1935. A Dynamic Theory of Personality. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  34. Roskos-Ewoldsen, David R., and Russell H. Fazio. 1992. On the orienting value of attitudes: Attitude accessibility as a determinant of an object’s attraction of visual attention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63: 198–211.
  35. Fazio, Russell H., Jim Blascovich, and Denise M. Driscoll. 1992. On the functional value of attitudes: The influence of accessible attitudes on the ease and quality of decision making. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18: 388–401.
  36. Fazio, Russell H., and Martha C. Powell. 1997. On the value of knowing one’s likes and dislikes: Attitude accessibility, stress, and health in college. Psychological Science 8: 430–36.
  37. Fazio, Russell H., and Carol J. Williams. 1986. Attitude accessibility as a moderator of the attitude-perception and attitude-behavior relations: An investigation of the 1984 presidential election. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51: 505–14.
More
© Text is available under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.
This entry is offline, you can click here to edit this entry!
Video Production Service
Feedback