Sep 10, 2025·General IQ & Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence

Explore the debate over emotional intelligence, its role beyond IQ, how it is measured, and why scientists question its uniqueness compared to personality and IQ.

Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist

IQ tests do not measure all aspects of people’s cognitive abilities. Indeed, human cognition is so broad and varied that doing so would require hundreds of hours of testing time per person. IQ test creators have always recognized this limitation.

Since the 1990s, many people have suggested that social or emotional intelligence is an important ability that is missing from traditional IQ tests. It is a legitimate viewpoint. Content on IQ tests tends to be very academic and deals with knowledge and abstract ideas. But humans are social animals who live in a social world. It seems reasonable that there are important aspects of cognition that relate to social and emotional aspects of people’s functioning.

Scientifically, social and emotional intelligence is a controversial topic among psychologists. Expert opinions range from complete denial to full acceptance, and with many scientists in between.

Aspects of Emotional Intelligence

According to one leading group of theorists, “the capacity to reason, understand, and manage emotions. In addition, emotional intelligence plausibly reflects the emotion system's capacity to use emotion to enhance thought." In this perspective, emotional intelligence is an ability that helps people (1) perceive emotions accurately, (2) make decisions with the assistance of their emotions, (3) understand emotions in themselves and others, and (4) manage their emotions.

Is Emotional Intelligence Real?

Psychologists have created tests based on this theory to measure emotional intelligence. The results show that the tests predict performance in school and the workplace. Clearly the tests are measuring something that matters in everyday life.

However, there are some caveats in this research. First, the relationship is very modest, usually between r = .0 and .25. If emotional intelligence is real it does not seem to have a strong influence in life decisions. Second, emotional intelligence overlaps a lot with both traditional intelligence and personality traits. After controlling for these known traits, there is little left over that is unique for emotional intelligence. That means that the emotional intelligence tests are redundant because they are measuring a mix of IQ and personality. In technical terminology, this means that emotional intelligence “has no incremental validity.”

These results are not surprising to experts in intelligence and personality. Some of the emotional intelligence tests, like the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test are essentially measures of cognition that happen to have emotional content. Other tests that are less cognitive tests, like situational tests of emotional management, essentially ask people to report whether they can react to a situation in a way that manages emotions in a beneficial way. These tests seem to ask people to apply their personality traits to different social or emotional situations.

The jury is still out on social and emotional intelligence. The theory is intriguing, but emotional intelligence tests need to have better incremental validity and improve the predictions if they are going to supplement personality and IQ tests.