Emotional Intelligence and Academic Success 1 The Relation of Emotional Intelligence to Academic Success

A great deal of excitement surrounds the claim that emotional intelligence predicts success at work, at school, and in relationships. For example, TIME magazine claimed “emotional intelligence may be the best predictor of success in life, redefining what it means to be smart” (1995). Unfortunately, little research has been done to either support or refute this claim. The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive validity of emotional intelligence in the realm of academic success, and to compare its validity to that of traditional cognitive abilities and personality dimensions. In addition, emotional intelligence will be more practically useful if it allows us not just to predict academic success, but also to improve our prediction when the cognitive and personality domains are already being measured. Therefore, the incremental predictive validity of emotional intelligence was also examined. Over 300 psychology undergraduates completed batteries of emotional intelligence, cognitive abilities, and personality dimensions, and gave permission for their grades to be obtained from university records. Of these, 110 subjects had complete data on all variables. From this data, it appears that emotional intelligence predicts academic success, and can improve our prediction when the cognitive and personality domains have already been measured. In fact, in this sample, the emotional intelligence measures were better able to predict academic success than either the personality or cognitive variables. This result does not mean that emotional intelligence is more important than those other domains (emotional intelligence was given more testing time and used a greater range of test types, and there is likely restriction of range in the cognitive variables), only that it can be useful in the prediction of academic success. Second, several of the specific facets of emotional intelligence also have incremental predictive validity. Interestingly, if cognitive and personality variables have been entered into the multiple regression equations first, some facets of emotional intelligence (such as Social Insight) are positively related to academic success (have positive Beta-weights), while others are negatively related. These findings should be extended to other areas of success, and should be repeated with larger samples. Emotional Intelligence and Academic Success 3