Emotional intelligence: 5 skills, research, how to grow it

Emotional intelligence (EQ, also called the emotional quotient) is the ability to notice, understand, use and manage emotions, both your own and those of the people around you. It does go with work, school and health, but the links research finds are small to moderate, nowhere near the claim that “EQ decides your life.” The definition fight, five components in everyday situations, how to read a score and how to practice are covered in that order.

What is emotional intelligence? EQ, emotional quotient and emotional intelligence mean the same thing

Emotional intelligence is a set of skills for handling emotional information: recognizing a feeling, understanding where it comes from and getting it to help rather than get in the way.

The concept’s formal starting point is a paper by Salovey and Mayer (1990). They described emotional intelligence as a set of skills that includes accurately appraising and expressing your own and other people’s emotions, regulating emotion in yourself and others effectively, and using feelings to motivate plans and goals. Five years later Goleman published Emotional Intelligence, subtitled “Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.” The book made “EQ” a household term worldwide and brought along the debates of the following decades.

The vocabulary varies, and you will run into all of these:

• Emotional intelligence: the term in academic papers, and the one used in this article.
• EQ: short for emotional quotient, a term modeled on IQ (intelligence quotient).
• Emotional quotient: the spelled-out form of EQ.
• High EQ: the everyday compliment, as in “she has such high EQ,” which usually means someone tactful and easy to be around.

The word “quotient” is a little misleading. IQ has a long-standardized conversion, while EQ has no single ruler used worldwide: each test has its own score range, a point the score section comes back to. Note too that “high EQ” in casual talk often shrinks to “good with words, gives people an out,” which is only one corner of emotional intelligence.

Three definitions of emotional intelligence: ability, trait and mixed

Researchers still have no consensus on whether emotional intelligence is an ability or a personality trait, and that is the main reason different EQ tests so often disagree.

The first camp is the ability model. Mayer, Caruso and Salovey (2016) treat emotional intelligence as a mental ability with four branches: perceiving emotions, using emotions to facilitate thought, understanding emotions and managing emotions. Because it is an ability, it is tested with tasks that have right answers, such as reading the emotion in a face or judging how effective a way of handling something is; its flagship instrument is the MSCEIT.

The second camp is the trait model. Petrides and Furnham (2001) argue that asking “how good do you think you are at handling emotions” measures a set of emotion-related self-perceptions that belongs with personality. They analyzed Bar-On’s EQ-i self-report inventory and found it fits inside existing personality frameworks, which they call trait emotional intelligence (trait EI).

The third camp is the mixed model, which bundles ability, motivation, optimism, social skills and other positive traits together; Goleman’s five components and Bar-On’s model both belong here. Mayer, Salovey and Caruso (2008) criticized part of the field for measuring a blend of well-being, self-esteem and optimism, far from the original idea of emotional intelligence.

How far apart are the three? Brackett and Mayer (2003) had the same people take the ability test MSCEIT and two self-report scales. The ability test and the self-reports were barely related, the two self-report scales were moderately related to each other, and both overlapped heavily with personality and well-being measures. So one person can score high on self-report and merely average on ability tasks. It is much like rating your own driving and then taking a road test: thinking you are good at reading a room and truly reading someone’s face are two different things.

Our EQ test takes a mixed approach: a 20-item self-rating scale plus 15 scenario-judgment questions from everyday life. The four options in each scenario are graded “best move,” “okay” or “likely to backfire,” and the grades are our own, without expert-consensus scoring or a norm study. That gives it a layer of “what would you actually do” beyond pure self-report, but it is still not a formal ability test.

The five components of emotional intelligence, in everyday life

The most cited five-part model of emotional intelligence comes from Goleman: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. Our EQ test uses the same five, under the same names in the report.

The publisher’s reader’s guide to Goleman’s book spells the five out plainly: self-awareness is recognizing an emotion as it happens, self-regulation is managing impulses and recovering from low moods, motivation is putting emotion to work for goals and staying hopeful after setbacks, empathy is reading the signals other people do not say aloud, and social skills is handling relationships with tact.

Self-awareness: give the feeling an accurate name

A person with strong self-awareness automatically unpacks a vague “ugh” into what it is: embarrassment at being called out in front of everyone, or resentment about working another weekend. Unpacking it matters because different emotions need different handling: embarrassment needs time, resentment needs to be heard.

Research also supports the idea that naming helps in itself. Lieberman and colleagues (2007) used brain imaging to show that putting words on the emotion in negative pictures reduced responses in emotion regions such as the amygdala. Research reviewed by Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight (2015) found that people who distinguish negative emotions in finer detail are less likely to turn to harmful ways of coping, such as heavy drinking, aggression or self-harm, during intense distress.

Self-regulation: leave a few seconds between the trigger and the reaction

It is eleven at night and a relative in the family group chat takes a jab at your job. Someone with good self-regulation still gets stung; they put the phone down and decide the next day whether to answer and how. The goal is a buffer between feeling and action, not wiping the feeling out. If a Read receipt with no reply sends you spiraling and your thumbs will not stop, how to settle yourself with anxious attachment offers another angle on regulating emotion.

Motivation: still finding a reason to continue after a setback

Plenty of people assume motivation is willpower, but it is closer to a way of explaining setbacks. Stuck in week three of studying for a certification, one person thinks “I just can’t learn this,” and another thinks “this method does not suit me, so I will change it.” The second person is more likely to reach exam day, thanks to a different account of failure and not necessarily to more grit.

Empathy: take in the feeling first, then talk solutions

A friend sends a long late-night message about a breakup, and your first reply is “I told you not to date them.” You may be right, but what they hear is blame. A person with strong empathy first says “that sounds really painful,” waits until the friend is done, and then asks whether they want advice.

Empathy is not the same as “being easily swayed by other people’s feelings.” Easy contagion is closer to inborn sensitivity: highly sensitive people often pick up others’ emotions first without knowing how to respond, and what is a highly sensitive person covers that.

Social skills: say the hard thing so people can hear it

When a coworker presents your idea as theirs in a meeting, someone with weak social skills may blow up on the spot or sulk at home for a week. Someone with strong ones adds in the meeting, “I put together some data on this direction last week and can share it,” taking the credit back without souring the room. Turning down a request, mediating between two friends and being the first to reach out after a fight also belong here.

Does EQ matter more than IQ? The research is more cautious than the book title

Current meta-analyses show emotional intelligence has positive correlations with work, school and health, mostly between .2 and .35; for school, after controlling for intelligence and personality, what it adds shrinks to a few percentage points.

“EQ matters more than IQ” is one of the most repeated claims online, but Goleman’s title actually says “can” matter more. The publisher’s reader’s guide is more specific: IQ predicts well whether someone can meet the cognitive demands of a job, but among candidates who are already very bright, it does little to tell who will become the best leader. That is a conditional claim, and the conditions disappear when it is retold as “EQ matters more than IQ.”

At work, O'Boyle and colleagues (2011) found that the three kinds of EI measure had corrected correlations with job performance between .24 and .30, and that self-report and mixed measures still predicted something extra after intelligence and Big Five personality were taken out. But Joseph and Newman (2010) also found that the link between ability EI and job performance is not uniform: in jobs with heavy emotional labor, such as retail, customer service and nursing, higher EI helps; in jobs with little emotional labor, the association turns out negative.

For school, MacCann and colleagues (2020) pooled data from 42,529 students and found an overall relation between EI and academic performance of ρ = .20, highest for ability EI (.24) and lowest for self-report (.12). After controlling for intelligence and Big Five personality, EI explained only 0.7% to 2.3% more of the difference, ranking behind intelligence and conscientiousness. The authors also caution that the data cannot yet say whether EI leads to better grades or the reverse.

For health, Martins and colleagues (2010) combined 105 effect sizes and 19,815 people and found EI related to health, with a stronger link for self-report questionnaires (r = .34) than for ability tests (.17); the link was also higher for mental health (.36) and psychosomatic symptoms (.33) than for physical health (.27). Part of the stronger self-report link may come from its built-in overlap with personality and well-being.

Some scholars question the concept at its root. Locke (2005) argued that emotional intelligence is not a real intelligence and its definition is so broad that nearly anything fits. The criticism did not stop the research, but it left a useful habit: when you see the words “emotional intelligence,” ask which kind is meant.

In the research, EQ and IQ come out roughly like this: IQ handles reasoning, problem solving and abstract knowledge, EQ handles emotional information, and the two are related but divide the work differently; in many situations that involve dealing with people, EQ can add a little on top of intelligence.

High EQ does not mean smooth talking: three online misconceptions

“High EQ” online is often narrowed to being smooth, never getting angry and looking after everyone’s feelings, but all three are only a small corner of emotional intelligence and sometimes come at a cost.

Misconception one: high EQ means saying polished things

The “high-EQ replies” that go around social media are mostly a well-turned line, such as the perfect comeback when a relative asks about your salary. Being articulate belongs to social skills, but without awareness and empathy behind it, polished lines are a memorized script that fails in the next setting.

Misconception two: high EQ means never getting angry

Self-regulation gives emotion an outlet and stops it from making your decisions; it is not pretending nothing happened. Someone who keeps saying “I’m fine” is sometimes the last to notice they have been worn out for a while. People with high EQ get angry too; they are better at choosing the time and the way to say it.

Misconception three: high EQ means taking care of everyone

Always smoothing things over and never refusing looks mature, and the cost is often pushing your own needs to the back again and again. Emotional intelligence includes understanding yourself, so drawing boundaries falls within it. If you often agree and then regret it, or fear upsetting others more than you fear being tired, take a look at what is a people pleaser.

Emotional intelligence has a dark side

Emotional intelligence has no moral direction of its own. Two studies by Côté, DeCelles and colleagues (2011) found that emotion regulation knowledge (knowing what works to change emotions) amplifies a person’s existing tendencies: among people high in that knowledge, the link between moral identity and prosocial behavior was stronger (study one, a social dilemma experiment), and so were the links between Machiavellianism (a tendency to manipulate others toward your ends) and interpersonally harmful behavior toward coworkers (study two). The skill of regulating emotions can also be used to manipulate people.

What low EQ looks like

Lower emotional intelligence usually means a few components have not been practiced yet, and it has nothing to do with being a bad person. Common patterns include snapping at someone and only then realizing you are upset, one small thing going wrong souring the whole day, rushing to explain when a friend vents, going silent or coming on too strong when opinions differ, and finding it hard to be the first to reach out after a fight. These are tendencies that shift with setting and state, and all of them can be practiced.

How to read an EQ score: there is no single normal EQ

“What is a normal EQ” has no standard answer, because every emotional intelligence test uses its own score scale and its own comparison group.

Take the commercial EQ-i 2.0. The publisher MHS’s handbook explains that it converts raw scores to standard scores with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, based on a reference group of 4,000 people collected in 2010. On that instrument, around 100 is average and about 115 is one standard deviation above. That number is valid only for that instrument and cannot be carried to another test.

Free online EQ tests are even more varied. Some cite an “international standard” or a famous designer without saying where the items came from, who the sample was or how reliable the scores are. Three things to check when choosing a test: whether it explains the basis of its items, how scores are computed, and who the scores are compared with.

How our EQ test scores are computed

Our Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Test has 35 questions. Each of the five components has 4 self-rating items, 2 of them reverse-scored, plus 3 scenario-judgment questions. Self-rating items score 0 to 4 by agreement, and scenario items give 4 points for the best move, 2 for okay and 0 for likely to backfire. Each component’s raw score runs from 0 to 28 and is converted to 0 to 100 so that random answering averages exactly 50; the overall EQ score is the average of the five.

We ran a few extreme answer patterns through the test’s own scoring code to help you understand the design:

• Answering “Agree” on every self-rating item and the best move on every scenario gives 71 in all five components, which lands in Steady Hands. Reverse-scored items cancel the forward ones, so agreeing all the way through does not push the score up.
• Choosing the ideal answer on every self-rating item but the likely-to-backfire option on every scenario gives only 57, which lands in Getting the Hang of It. Of each component’s 28 points, 12 come from the scenarios, so rating yourself highly cannot carry you into the upper range.
• Answering “Neutral” on every self-rating item and “okay” on every scenario gives exactly 50.

The overall score falls into five bands: 0 to 47 is Warming Up, 48 to 61 is Getting the Hang of It, 62 to 74 is Steady Hands, 75 to 87 is Emotional Tuner, and 88 and above is Emotional Navigator. The cutoffs were calibrated on simulated typical answers, so they show relative position, and they are not norms built from a real US sample.

The report also picks three of your scenario answers for a debrief, explaining how your choice differs from the best move, and gives three practices based on your two weakest components. Mood, sleep and stress on the day all shift the result, so some movement on a retake after a while is normal.

Can emotional intelligence be trained? Yes, with a moderate effect

Both meta-analyses found that scores rise by a moderate amount after emotional intelligence training; most studies measure test scores, though, and change in everyday life needs more evidence.

Hodzic and colleagues (2018) gathered 24 training studies with healthy adults and found a moderate improvement in EI scores from before to after training, still present at follow-up. Mattingly and Kraiger (2019) included 58 studies and also found a moderate positive effect, though published papers showed larger effects than dissertations, which may indicate publication bias, so the real effect may be a bit smaller than the numbers suggest.

The most effective way to practice is to pick one component and one small move and repeat it until it runs on its own under pressure. One practice per component follows, all of which can start this week:

At work, communication also runs into differences in style, since some people value efficiency and others value atmosphere, and reading the other person’s style makes empathy and social skills much more useful; DISC personality communication scripts pair well with this.

After the EQ test: next steps and when to get professional help

An EQ score is best used to find the next component to practice; putting a “high EQ” or “low EQ” label on yourself or anyone else does little good.

First, start with the “most worth practicing” item in the report, choose a practice from the table above, and retest after a month to see whether that corner has grown. Second, read EQ alongside other tests. Trait emotional intelligence overlaps a lot with personality, and the model in Joseph and Newman (2010) also links emotion regulation to neuroticism, the opposite pole of emotional stability, in the Big Five; see what is the Big Five personality model. If your emotional swings gather mostly in romantic relationships, attachment styles may explain them more closely. Third, treat a score as a starting point for conversation. Taking it with a partner or coworker and comparing each other’s ace and most-worth-practicing components is usually far more useful than arguing over who has higher EQ.

When to get professional help

Lower EQ is not an illness and needs no treatment. But if your emotions swing enough to affect sleep, work or relationships, have not improved for several weeks, or you often find yourself hurting yourself or others when emotions run high, it is worth talking to a psychiatrist, a primary care doctor, a clinical psychologist or a licensed counselor. If you feel too low to cope and need someone to talk to, call or text 988 (the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, free, 24 hours a day). If you are outside the US, contact your local crisis line or emergency services. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.