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The measurement of Emotional Intelligence

 

Marcello Mortillaro 
University of Geneva – Swiss Center for Affective Sciences

Researchers could use only one multi-branch performance-based measure of Ability Emotional Intelligence (Ability-EI) for many years. Despite the value and validity of this one test, the absence of alternative measures was a severe limitation for the approach, especially when compared to the multitude of instruments and surveys for assessing Trait-EI. For example, some recent meta-analyses questioned the predictive validity of Ability-EI for job performance. However, the nearly complete overlap between Ability-EI and one measure makes this conclusion complicated, as problems may lie in the measure and not in the construct.

Recently, new measures to assess Ability-EI have been developed and made available to academic researchers. Each of them suggested potential improvements towards better and more complete measurement of EI. This talk will present some innovations and potential new directions for measuring Ability-EI. First, I will discuss the need to create a closer link between the EI literature and the general emotion literature, which surprisingly have had very few exchanges so far. I will argue that EI measures should be grounded in state-of-the-art models and theories of emotions and emotional competencies. I will discuss specific examples of how researchers can do this integration. Second, new measures of Ability-EI should use the Situational Judgment framework and a more context-dependent approach in the formulation of the items. I suggest that specific professional contexts may need more context-related scenarios. Third, I will discuss potentially better ways for scoring performance tests than consensus scoring and tasks to measure emotional competencies directly. 


Richard D.  Roberts

RAD Science

In this presentation, I extend on the arguments provided by Professor Mortillaro to provide still further methodologies for the assessment of Ability-EI. In particular, the following three methodologies, along with ancillary psychometric models, are discussed: (a) The principal agent paradigm, (b) the constructed response paradigm, and (c) the forced-choice paradigm. I argue that these approaches can be used to measure emotional understanding and emotional management especially well, providing preliminary validity evidence in support of this assertion. 

Collectively, these talks aim to open a discussion and conversation in our field about new and possibly better ways for measuring EI. We conclude by exploring possible use cases for these new assessment methodologies.