Social Psychology Commons^™

How Many Emotional Intelligence Abilities Are There? An Examination Of Four Measures Of Emotional Intelligence, John Mayer, David R. Caruso, Gill Sitarenios, Manolo Romero Escobar

UNH Personality Lab

The ability model of emotional intelligence (EI) specifies that four related abilities are involved: perceiving emotions, facilitating thought using emotions, understanding emotions, and managing them. Several performance-based assessments have been developed to measure those four abilities. Although some researchers find empirical support for the four abilities, others have argued that emotional intelligence divides into three abilities, two or even a single, unitary ability (Legree et al., 2014; Palmer, Gignac, Manocha, & Stough, 2005). We reanalyzed archival data from four ability tests of emotional intelligence, Ns = 503, 5000, 1000, and 2000, conducting item-level exploratory factor models of all four assessments …