Why do your assess­ments mea­sure emo­tional intelligence?

Why do you say some of your assess­ments mea­sure emo­tional intel­li­gence even though they do not have the words emo­tion or emo­tional intel­li­gence in their names?  Exam­ples include the Per­sonal Excel­lence Map® (PEM®), Skills for Career And Life Effec­tive­ness® (SCALE®), and oth­ers on your website.

Answer:  Our ori­en­ta­tion about how people’s emo­tions man­i­fest effec­tive, healthy behav­iors can be traced back to Gary Low’s doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tion (1969).  Essen­tially, Dr. Low learned through his research that the only assess­ment ever designed to mea­sure Self-Actualization (Shostrom POI), did not do a very good job of mea­sur­ing what he and his col­league, Dar­win Nel­son, con­cep­tu­al­ized as healthy being in the world.  The first fac­tor study of Nel­son & Low’s Per­sonal Skills Map (Steven Link, 1985) showed that healthy ways of being, accord­ing to the PSM®, con­tained intrap­er­sonal skills, inter­per­sonal skills, and life man­age­ment skills.  We see the three fac­tors of trans­for­ma­tive EI as the skills-based equiv­a­lent of the EI fac­tors intro­duced ini­tially by Mayer and Salovey (1990), and dis­cussed later by Gole­man (1995) and others.

How do you jus­tify your assess­ments as mea­sures of emo­tional intelligence?

How do you jus­tify your assess­ments as mea­sures of EI since many pre-date Mayer and Salovey’s (1990) research?

Answer:  All our assess­ments mea­sure emo­tional intel­li­gence based on our applied the­ory of what con­sti­tutes the con­struct.  Accord­ing to our skills-based approach, EI is the behav­ioral by-product of apply­ing spe­cific emo­tional skills reflected in four key areas of life: (1) accu­rate knowl­edge and value of self, (2) a vari­ety of healthy rela­tion­ships, (3) work­ing well with oth­ers, and (4) cop­ing health­ily with the demands and pres­sures of every­day work and life.  All our assess­ment items are behav­iorally anchored and reflect emo­tional processes. Whereas the MSCEIT® is a test of peo­ples’ intel­li­gence about their emo­tions (Epstein, 2010), our mea­sures are assess­ments of the intel­li­gence of peo­ples’ emo­tions that man­i­fest effec­tive, healthy behav­iors in life.  Our approach is edu­ca­tional and trans­for­ma­tive because of our ori­en­ta­tion about what EI is.