What We Know about Emotional Intelligence – Review

Are there underlying human abilities to relate emotionally with other people which are genetically inherited? If there are these abilities, can they be defined, identified, measured and put to good use? And can this newly defined entity, Emotional Intelligence (EI), be given a simple number or other tag? Can there be a simple number for Emotional Intelligence (EI) similar to the one used for measuring human intelligence, the Intelligence Quotient (IQ)?

What We Know about Emotional Intelligence: How It Affects Learning, Work, Relationships, and Our Mental Health by Moshe Zeidner, Gerald Matthews, and Richard D. Roberts

This book explores those questions and others in an effort to determine in a scientifically testable way many factors underlying human interactions. First this book begins with a discussion of scientific methods and a brief description of statistics and how they intend to measure emotions and then there are several attempts to define Emotional Intelligence in a way which can be studied, tested, compared, verified and retested.

This is a very new field of inquiry and they admit early on that they are having trouble getting something really effective going. The exploration starts off seemingly well enough with what they call the five factor model (FFM). 1. Neuroticism – Anxiety, angry hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness, vulnerability. 2. Extroversion – Warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement-seeking, positive emotions. 3. Openness – Fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, values. 4. Agreeableness – Trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, tender-mindedness. 5. Conscientiousness - Competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, deliberation (from Costa and McCrae 1992). It is said that these are good factors because they offer 1. Heritability, 2. Consensual validation. 3. Cross-cultural invariance. 4. Predictive utility.

It all seems like the field is off to a reasonable start but when they try and define questions and give the questions to large numbers of subjects they don’t get very good results. It seems they get very low correlations between sought for relationships meaning the questions don’t mean much or alternatively they get extremely high correlations which means the questions are too self referential and are not discovering anything. For example, when these tests are set up in such a way as to be self reporting by the subjects on objectively rating their own Emotional Intelligence, using these questions, their scores were not predictive, compared to external observers’ analysis, and even counter predictive. People who thought they were superior were in fact inferior on those measures.

Everyone knows there are differences between people and their individual abilities to cope reasonably with their personal environments but the problem becomes what are these traits and how to label them for study. These scientists were rather condescending toward the common man’s analysis of the problem because the common man can not put their knowledge to scientifically reproducible tests. That may be true but I think the scientists should consider where the heritability of the traits which they seek to study came from. It is those very traits, if they are indeed heritable, which were created by the choices for sexual selection and artificial selection by our human ancestors. Those ancestors were common people and in most ways less informed about how the world works than toady’s common man. If these scientists are to create a verbalized list of traits and questions they should look to those qualities which young men and women were looking for in their selection of mates. If there is a heritability to these traits it is those ancestral people who created the traits. Those traits became part of the human genome because those ancestors valued them.

The scientists who sought for the traits valued by ancient people would find much better success, no doubt, than picking out ones which fit our modern culture.