Trait and ability emotional intelligence

Two traditions

The trait tradition treats emotional intelligence as a disposition and measures it the way personality is measured: you rate statements about your typical behaviour. The ability tradition treats it as a capacity and measures it the way reasoning is measured: you answer scored problems about emotion, with better and worse answers. Both are called emotional intelligence, both aim at the territory the four-domain map carves up, and they are different measurements of it. This split is one of three things people mean by the types of emotional intelligence.

The uncomfortable finding is how weakly the two agree. Self-described emotional skill and scored emotional performance correlate far less than most people expect, and studies tend to find the gap again wherever the two are measured together. It is among the field’s best-replicated findings, and it is why two tests can hand the same person two numbers while both are working as designed.

What this means for a report

A report that fuses a self-description and a performance into one figure is asserting that two weakly related things are the same thing. Ours refuses to: the questionnaire and the situational section are scored as separate tracks, labelled "how you see yourself" and "how you performed", and the gap between them, when there is one, is treated as a finding rather than an embarrassment. The method page sets out both tracks.

The rest of this family

Each page here covers one part of the territory: the map starts at what emotional intelligence is.