The framework
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is usually described as one trait. It is better understood as four related abilities, and the shape across them tells you far more than any single score.
What it measures
The dimensions underneath.
This is built on the branch model of emotional intelligence, which treats it as four related abilities rather than one trait: perceiving emotion, using it to think, understanding how it works, and managing it. The four are related but separable, and the shape across them is more informative than any single overall figure.
Perceiving emotion
Noticing emotional state, in yourself and in other people.
Using emotion
Letting emotional information inform thinking and judgement.
Understanding emotion
Knowing how emotions arise, combine and escalate.
Managing emotion
Regulating your own state and influencing other people’s.
Method
What it cannot tell you.
- This is a self-report measure, so it captures what you believe about your emotional skill. That is related to actual ability but it is not the same thing, and the gap is largest at both ends.
- People who are genuinely poor at reading emotion are, for the same reason, poor at judging that they are. Self-report cannot fix this.
- The band is a description, not a norm. Until this test has enough completions to compute real quartiles, the cut points are evenly spaced rather than derived from a population.
- Emotional intelligence is context-dependent. Most people are markedly better at this with some people than others, and a single score averages that away.
- This is not a clinical or hiring instrument and should not be used as one.
Which one are you?
5 minutes, free, and you get both scores rather than just a label.