The Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i; Bar-On, 1997), the first commercially developed test for emotional intelligence (EI), was a highly innovative tool for its time. It brought together, in a single measure, a broad set of emotional and social competencies that had been studied for many decades (see Salovey and Mayer, 1990 for a review of this early literature), but prior to the EQ-i could only be measured in a piecemeal fashion. Twenty-five years later, the EI area appears to be in a state of flux. While the EI area has always attracted critics (see Dasborough et al., 2021 for some context), it now seems slow to respond or adapt to a large research literature from a diverse range of fields. These areas connect a variety of emotion-related constructs with a great number of health and wellness outcomes (Pisani et al., 2021): affect regulation, alexithymia, interoceptive awareness, mindfulness, and personal intelligence, to identify just a few.
The latter construct of personal intelligence (PI) is a good example to highlight, as measures like the Multidimensional Inventory of Personal Intelligence (MIPI; Parker, 2022) are taking the assessment of emotional and social competencies in very new directions. Although PI has been defined differently by others (e.g., Mayer, 2008), it is conceptualized for the MIPI as three sets of inter-related non-cognitive competencies: emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and motivational intelligence. Taken together, PI involves competencies related to understanding oneself and others, meaningfully connecting and engaging with family, friends, and co-workers, and successfully adapting to changing environmental concerns and demands.
Work connected to the development of the MIPI started in the early 2000s as a practical response to the escalation of costs for commercially developed EI tools. As noted by Parker (this issue), his research group developed their own EI measure to assess constructs congruent with those on the EQ-i and similar self-report EI measures of the time (e.g., Petrides & Furnham, 2001; Schutte et al., 1998). As work progressed on what was then called the “Multidimensional Inventory for Emotional Intelligence” (MIEI; Wood et al., 2009), other modifications were carried-out to address several problematic features of current EI measures that are widely used in the EI area, including the following:
- Mood contamination in EI-related measures. As noted in Parker (this issue), there is something of a paradox in the EI literature. Not only do researchers rarely control for mood when using EI measures to study health and wellness variables, but many EI measures are themselves contaminated by the inclusion of mood-related items as part of EI-related scales. The MIPI also includes a measure of optimism, but it is provided as a validity indicator to help interpret specific test-taker profiles, since a test-taker’s mood at the time of an assessment can substantially impact test scores. The MIPI’s optimism scale is not included in the calculation of any of its PI-related competencies.
- Narrowness of emotional competencies. As noted earlier, a large research literature has emerged in the past few decades connecting a variety of emotion-related constructs (e.g., alexithymia, interoceptive awareness, etc.) with numerous health and wellness outcomes. However, with respect to the specific emotional competencies tapped by widely used EI measures, their range is underwhelming. Specific competencies are still linked exclusively to the literature reviewed by Salovey and Mayer in their original 1990 paper. Concerned that the EI competencies on the original MIEI were not sufficiently diverse enough to reflect developments in the affect regulation and alexithymia areas, Parker and colleagues revisited the content and structure of EI items used with their tool. Results from a series of confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) demonstrate that the total EI on the MIPI is assessed via four related constructs: emotional understanding, introspectiveness, attentiveness, and emotional communication, all of which are connected to a higher-order EI construct.
- Overlapping boundaries for emotional and social competencies. It is also common for the authors of EI measures to explicitly describe their assessment tools as measuring both emotional and social competencies (e.g., Bar-On, 1997). There is nothing inherently incorrect about this practice, since EI involves both intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts. For some instruments, developers are very clear that specific scales are connected to emotional competencies while others are explicitly connected to social competencies. Unfortunately, other EI measures blur the boundaries between emotional and social competencies; respondents may report a better understanding of emotional issues compared to social contexts. In this case, a moderate score on the global EI scale for these measures may mask a real deficit in social competency. On the other hand, a moderate score might mean the opposite: the individual might have a better understanding of social versus emotional issues. To better distinguish between emotional and social competencies, the MIPI has a set of items that tap three very specific social intelligence dimensions: performance readiness, social integration, and social agency. Based on a series of CFAs, the 3 social intelligence scales are connected to a higher-order SI construct.
- Neglecting the importance of motivation. Perhaps one of the most problematic conceptual gaps in existing EI measures is the lack of attention to motivational issues (Apter, 2018). Existing EI measures assume that the relative strength of measured social or emotional competencies predicts a respondent’s processing and experience of social or emotional information. However, as others have noted (e.g., Ybarra et al., 2014) emotional experiences are often ambiguous; their meaning is as much a reflection of the actual stimuli as the way a person might construe them. A great deal of what influences a person’s interpretation of emotionally relevant material is connected to a person’s motivation. For example, a person may have a very good understanding of non-verbal cues and how certain behaviours may be interpreted by others but still act in a manner inconsistent with that knowledge (e.g., yawning while a subordinate tells you about a sensitive personal matter). Without some understanding of basic motivation, it may be very difficult to predict future emotionally or socially intelligent behaviour from test scores. For example, does someone’s poor emotional competency result from a lack of ability, poor motivation, or a combination of the two? To address this issue on existing EI measures, the MIPI contains items that tap three related motivational intelligence dimensions: motivational influence, perseverance, and motivational self-efficacy. Based on a series of CFAs, the 3 motivation scales are connected to a higher-order MI construct.
In total, the MIPI consists of a little over 100 items distributed across various scales and subscales. The instrument uses a standard 5-point Likert format in which test-takers rate each question with respect to their own experience. Based on a series of CFAs, the EI, SI and MI scales are connected to a higher-order PI construct. The MIPI has been normed for individuals 18 years of age or older. Its measured competencies are relevant to a variety of diverse business and educational settings, as well as many clinical and counselling contexts (Crane, 2021).
This is crucial because the COVID-19 pandemic and radical work-life changes it prompted (e.g., isolation, mass resignations, etc.) have made the development of PI-related competencies more relevant than ever before (Rooksby et al., 2020; Tessema et al., 2022). As pandemic restrictions continue to ease, students and workers alike must necessarily reappraise relationships with their respective institutions (and vice versa). What new equilibrium results will largely depend on the emotional, social and motivational choices all parties make during re-integration. Fortunately, all of these competencies (and associated soft skills) are eminently teachable (Crane, 2020), a fact that has always been a part of general interest in EI. In the coming months and years, we predict a burgeoning need for soft skills training across a variety of work and education contexts.
References
Crane, A. G. (2021). Coaching with the MIPI. Peterborough, Ontario: Adaptimist Insights.
Crane, A.G., Cormier, M.L., Taylor, R.N. & Parker, J.D.A. (2020). Teaching emotional and social competencies: Efficacy of a work readiness program designed for vulnerable youth. Work: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment & Rehabilitation , 67(2), 407-418.
Bar-On, R. (1997). Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i): Technical manual. Toronto: Multi-Health Systems.
Dasborough, M. T., Ashkanasy, N. M., Humphrey, R. H., Harms, P. D., Credé, M., & Wood, D. (2021). Does leadership still not need emotional intelligence? Continuing “The Great EI Debate”. The Leadership Quarterly, 101539.
Mayer, J. D. (2008). Personal intelligence. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 27, 209–232.
Parker, J. D. A. (2022). Multidimensional Inventory of Personal Intelligence (MIPI): Technical Manual. Peterborough, Ontario: Adaptimist Insights.
Petrides, K. V. & Furnham, A. (2001). Trait emotional intelligence: psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies. European Journal of Personality, 15, 425-448.
Pisani, S., Murphy, J., Conway, J., Millgate, E., Catmur, C., & Bird, G. (2021). The relationship between Alexithymia and Theory of Mind: A systematic review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 131, 497-524.
Rooksby, M., Furuhashi, T. & McLeod, H.J. (2020). Hikikomori: A hidden mental health need following the COVID-19 pandemic. World Psychiatry, 19(3), 399-400.
Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 9, 185-211.
Schutte, N. S., Malouff, J. M., Hall, L. E., Haggerty, D. J., Cooper, J. T., Golden, C. J., et al. (1998). Development and validation of a measure of emotional intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 25, 167-177.
Tessema, M. T., Tesfom, G., Faircloth, M. A., Tesfagiorgis, M., & Teckle, P. (2022). The “Great Resignation”: Causes, Consequences, and Creative HR Management Strategies. Journal of Human Resource and Sustainability Studies, 10(1), 161-178.
Ybarra, O., Kross, E., & Sanchez-Burks, J. (2014). The “big idea” that is yet to be: Toward a more motivated, contextual, and dynamic model of emotional intelligence. Academy of Management Perspectives, 28, 93-107.
Wood, L. M., Parker, J. D. A., & Keefer, K. V. (2009). The Emotion Quotient Inventory: A review of the relevant research. In C. Stough, D. H. Saklofske, & J. D. A. Parker (Eds.), Assessing emotional intelligence: Theory, research and applications (pp. 67-84). New York: Springer.
Apter, M. J. (2018). Zigzag: Reversal and paradox in human personality. Troubador Publishing Ltd.
About the Authors
A. Geoffrey Crane, MSc, is currently working on his PhD in Interdisciplinary Social Research at Trent University, Ontario, Canada. He is especially interested in the educational implications of non-cognitive constructs, such as personal intelligence. He has played a role in developing numerous related intervention programs with community partners. To find out more about the MIPI, please visit https://adaptimist.com/clinicalopens in new window.
Colin T. Henning, BAH, is currently a graduate student in the AMOD program at Trent University. His research focuses on evaluating the psychometric properties of various EI-related measures, as well as examining the relationships between EI and several health and wellness variables.