EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE CORRELATES 1 Correlates of trait emotional intelligence: results from Canadian and Scottish groups

Emotional intelligence (EI), personality, alexithymia, life satisfaction, social support and health related measures were assessed in Canadian (N =500) and Scottish (N = 204) groups. EI was found to be negatively associated with alexithymia and alcohol consumption and positively associated with life satisfaction and social network size and quality. In order to clarify the multivariate associations amongst the measures used, regression analyses were performed. The results show that EI is more strongly associated than personality with social network size, but social network quality, alcohol consumption and health status are more strongly related to personality. The EI measures used had good psychometric properties, but more work is required to investigate the existence of other variables which associate more strongly with trait EI than with personality. EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE CORRELATES 3 1.Introduction The study of emotional intelligence (EI) is currently a topic of considerable interest and activity within individual differences research. The reasons for this interest are two-fold. Firstly, the idea that people differ in measurable ways in their emotional skills is an interesting idea in its own right, suggesting the opening up of an area of individual differences assessment not currently covered by existing measures of intelligence and personality. Secondly, emotional intelligence is expected to be linked to a range of theoretically interesting outcomes. The enhanced interpersonal skills of high-EI individuals would be expected to be associated with outcomes such as better social and personal relationships, whilst intrapersonal aspects of EI such as mood regulation would be expected to link to, for example, higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression. There is some uncertainty and controversy about EI assessment and validity; whilst the idea of EI is an appealing one, additional work on its psychometric properties and predictive validity is required. Currently EI is characterised by some researchers as an ability, involving the cognitive processing of emotional information, which is accordingly most appropriately measured by performance tests. An alternative proposal is that EI should be regarded as a dispositional tendency like personality which can be assessed by self-report questionnaire. A detailed discussion of EI measurement and problematic features associated with both approaches is given by Roberts, Zeidner and Matthews (2001) and Matthews, Zeidner & Roberts (2002). It is not currently clear if the two measurement methods actually assess the same construct, and in this context Petrides and Furnham (2001) have suggested the terminology ‘ability EI’ and ‘trait EI’ to distinguish the two measurement approaches. In the present work the focus is on trait EI. The problematic aspects of EI assessment by questionnaire include questions about the extent to which an individual’s selfreported EI relates to their real-world emotional skills, and the large correlations found between trait EI measures and personality (this second point is discussed in more detail below). Nonetheless, this method of EI assessment seems likely to continue to be widely used because of the straightforward nature of questionnaire compared to task-based assessment, and the possibilities for unsupervised use (e.g. in postal surveys). In the remainder of this introduction we briefly review what is currently known about the associations between trait EI and other measures, including those which might be regarded as outcomes of EI, and suggest some possibilities meriting further study. EI has been found to be associated with a range of outcomes which in a broad sense can be regarded as relating to quality of life. The associations which have been found are theoretically reasonable, with plausible links either to the interpersonal aspects of EI which would be expected to be associated with better quality of social interactions, or to intrapersonal aspects such as mood regulation. Findings include positive associations with life satisfaction and social network size and quality, and negative associations with loneliness (Ciarrochi, Chan & Bajgar, 2001; Dawda & Hart, 2000; Palmer, Donaldson & Stough, 2002; Saklofske, Austin & Minski, 2003; Schutte et al., 1998). Trait EI measures and alexithymia have been found to be strongly negatively correlated (Dawda & Hart, 2000; Parker, Taylor & Bagby, 2001; EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE CORRELATES 4 Saklofske et al., 2003; Schutte et. al, 1998) which is again theoretically interpretable given that alexithymia is defined by the features of difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings and externally-oriented thinking, which are clearly closely related to the low pole of EI. The possibility of associations between EI and health status and health behaviours is an interesting one which has not been widely studied. Given the existence of intrapersonal EI subcomponents related to emotion management, it seems reasonable to assume that high EI would be associated with better stress management and lower levels of psychological distress. Trait EI has been found to be negatively correlated with psychological distress (Slaski & Cartwright, 2002) and depression (Dawda & Hart, 2000; Schutte et al., 1998). Interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of EI may also be relevant to health behaviours, with high-EI individuals possibly having more positive interactions with health information providers and being more able to resist peer pressure in connection with risky health behaviours; the latter mechanism has been proposed by Trinidad and Johnson (2002) to explain negative associations found between EI and smoking and alcohol consumption in adolescents. Higher EI has also been found to be related to willingness to seek professional and non-professional help for personal-emotional problems, depression and suicidal ideation. (Ciarrochi & Deane, 2001). Considering the five-factor model of personality, trait EI measures have generally been found to have large significant correlations with Extraversion (E) and Neuroticism (N) (with positive and negative signs respectively) whilst smaller significant positive correlations with Openness (O), Agreeableness (A) and Conscientiousness (C) have also been found (Dawda & Hart, 2000; Petrides & Furnham, 2001; Saklofske et al., 2003; Schutte et al., 1998). The correlations with E and N are not surprising given that these traits are well known to be associated with the regulation of positive and negative mood respectively, and that mood regulation is an aspect of the conceptualisation of trait EI (Bar-On, 2000). Overlap between aspects of trait EI and facets of O, A and C, for example feelings, actions and ideas (O), trust and tender mindedness (A) and competence and dutifulness (C), leading to scale-level associations, would also be expected (McCrae, 2000). These relationships with personality do however raise the question of the distinctness of trait EI from the personality domain. One approach to this problem is to examine the incremental validity of trait EI over personality in the prediction of outcomes of the type discussed above. In this context, trait EI has been shown to have incremental validity in the prediction of life satisfaction, loneliness and depression-proneness (Palmer et al., 2002; Saklofske et al., 2003). The factor-analytic studies of Petrides and Furnham (2001) also provide evidence for the discriminant validity of trait EI by locating a distinct EI factor in the factor spaces defined by both the Eysenck personality scales and the five-factor model scales. The present study was designed to assess associations between EI at both the scale and sub-scale level and a range of theoretically linked variables (alexithymia, life satisfaction, social network size and quality). Some health-related measures were also included. Personality was assessed in order to be able to examine the issue of incremental validity of EI as a predictor discussed above. The EI measures used were the short Bar-On EQ-i (Bar-On, 2002) and a modified version of the Schutte et al. (1998) EI scale (Austin, Saklofske, Huang & McKenney, in press), allowing EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE CORRELATES 5 comparisons of the properties of these two measures. Data were obtained from both Scottish and Canadian samples, allowing some group comparisons.