CHAPTER
14
Measures of Ability and Trait
Emotional Intelligence
Alexander B. Siegling1, Donald H. Saklofske2and K.V . Petrides3
1University College London, London, UK;2University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada;
3University College London, London, UK
Emotional intelligence (EI) has emerged as a core construct in mainstream psychology and beyond. In an early
attempt to describe intelligence beyond the confines of the traditional ‘cognitive type’, E.L. Thorndike (1920) pro-
posed the notion of social intelligence, which he loosely defined as ‘the ability to understand men and women,
boys and girls /C0to act wisely in human relations’ (p. 227). The appealing nature of this hypothesis spawned
much empirical research that did not, on the whole, match expectations.
Nevertheless, the idea proved highly influential and was substantially extended by Gardner (1983) in his the-
ory of multiple intelligences. This theory also proved more influential than successful in terms of generating
empirical support. Of the various intelligences that Gardner suggested, his two personal intelligences (intraper-
sonal and interpersonal) are especially germane to EI. ‘Intrapersonal intelligence involves the capacity to under-
stand oneself, to have an effective working model of oneself /C0including one’s own desires, fears, and capacities
/C0and to use such information effectively in regulating one’s own life,’ whereas ‘interpersonal intelligence
denotes a person’s capacity to understand the intentions, motivations, and desires of other people and, conse-
quently, to work effectively with others’ ( Gardner, 1999 , p. 43).
Because ‘non-cognitive intelligences’ tend to be loos ely defined, great overlap exists between them. It is
almost impossible to delineate where one starts and t he other stops because their sampling domains, when
specified, overlap very considerably. Indeed, it may be fa ir to say that the proliferation of labels like ‘intraper-
sonal, interpersonal, emotional, and social’ to desc ribe what is, by and large, the same sampling domain is a
demonstration of the ‘jangle fallacy’ (viz., a groundle ss inference that two constructs are different simply
because they have different labels) that has been plaguing personality research for a long time ( Block, 1995 ).
Of all these interrelated constructs, EI is by far the most prevalent both in the academic as well as in the
popular literature.
Widespread interest in EI led to the development of m any different scales purporting to measure the con-
struct ( Stough, Saklofske, & Parker, 2009 ). Early work, some of it featured in this chapter, disregarded the dif-
ference between typical versus maximal performance ( Cronbach, 1949 ). Typical performance concerns how we
tend to behave most of the time and relies heavily on self -report measurement, whereas maximal performance
concerns how we behave when we exert maximum effor t in a situation and relies heavily on performance-
based tests.
In the field of EI, just like in the seed field of social intelligence, some researchers developed self-report ques-
tionnaires while others tried to develop maximum-performance tests, but all claimed to operationalize the same
construct, viz., EI. Petrides and Furnham (2001) argued that such claims are untenable because different measure-
ment approaches yield different results, even if they are based on the same underlying model. This argument has
381Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386915-9.00014-0 ©2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.