As a subfield in psychology initiated by Salovey and Mayer’s 1990 paper on the topic, the literature on emotional intelligence (EI) has grown to be vast in size. Using published journal papers as one indicator, the database in the ISI Web of Knowledge (IWK; Thompson-Reuters, 2017) for May 2022 contains over 13,000 papers on EI since 199. Parallel to this growth in EI research, the assessment of various EI-related competencies has also developed to be a major part of the psychological test industry. In fact, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i; Bar-On, 1997) and the 20th anniversary of the MSCEIT (Mayer et al., 2002)—two of the more widely used commercial assessment tools developed for EI. A recent review paper by Bru-Luna et al. (2021) identifies over 40 other EI measures that have been developed since 1990.
While the growth in interest in the EI construct has been dramatic, there are some odd features about the current state of the EI subfield, particularly if one revisits the original 1990 paper by Salovey and Mayer. To make the case for the new construct of EI, the authors reviewed a broad range of prior work, starting early in the 20th century with the literature on “intelligences” in areas like “social behaviour”. They also drew on work from clinical psychology, particularly the literature on “alexithymia” (a construct coined by Sifneos in 1973), since a growing body of research in the 1970s and 1980s supported the link between alexithymia and several common medical and psychiatric disorders. It is important to emphasize that Salovey and Mayer used their paper to champion the idea that the EI construct had important research and applied implications in a broad range of areas, but particularly the area of mental health.
It is therefore ironic, especially in light of the original 1990 paper, that the EI construct has actually inspired quite limited interest from the mental health field. Contrast this development with the construct of alexithymia, a variable which has been found to correlate quite strongly with EI measures (Parker et al., 2001) and for several decades has fostered a rich clinical literature on the implications of having deficits in various emotional and social competencies (Bagby et al., 2020). To illustrate this comparison, consider some publication patterns for the alexithymia and EI areas. For the over 13,000 papers mentioned earlier in the IWK, the following is a list of the top 10 journals publishing EI research (from highest to lowest): Personality and Individual Differences, Frontiers in Psychology, Emotion, International Journal of Environmental Research, Current Psychology, Sustainability, PLOS One, Journal of Learner Centered Curriculum and Instruction, Nurse Education Today, and Psychology Reports. Contrast this with the 5,974 papers on alexithymia in the IWK for the same time-period (1990-2022) and the following list of the top 10 journals publishing alexithymia research: Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Personality and Individual Differences, Frontiers in Psychology, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Comprehensive Psychiatry, PLOS One, Psychological Reports, Frontiers in Psychiatry, and the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Half of the list for alexithymia papers are explicitly connected to mental health research, while none of the journals for EI are linked (apart from one connected to nursing education and training).
Broad field codes in the IWK database also reveal important differences between the sets of publications for the EI and alexithymia areas. While the majority of papers in both sets are for the “Psychology” (50% for EI and 77% for alexithymia) and “Behavioral Sciences” fields (42% for EI and 65% for alexithymia), the sets diverge substantially for codes connected to mental health topics. While 58% of the alexithymia papers are classified as “Psychiatry”, only 10% of the EI papers are in this field. A similar pattern emerges for “Neuroscience” (32% for alexithymia papers versus 7% for EI). An obvious question is why the EI construct has inspired such a modest level of mental health research. There are likely a number of reasons for this, but I would like to use the rest of this paper to flesh out two likely factors.
As noted above, a large number of psychometric tools have been developed for the EI construct. While most of these tools are research forms available in the journal literature (e.g., Schutte et al., 1998), a sizeable number of tools have been developed for commercial purposes. What is particularly interesting about EI tests like the EQ-i (Bar-On, 1997), the EQ-i:2.0 (Multi-Health Systems, 2011), the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI; Boyatzis & Goleman, 2007) and the TEIQue (Petrides, 2009) is that they have evolved to be quite expensive relative to other tests and measures typically used by clinical psychologists.
Consider the following two clinical assessment scenarios. In the first, the clinician is doing some work readiness counseling with a young adult and wants to explore the potential impact of subclinical ADHD features. The second scenario is the same as the first, but instead of ADHD symptoms, the clinician wants to get a better understanding of their client’s overall levels of emotional and social competency. Using widely available assessment tools relevant to both scenarios, two very different financial stories emerge. For the first scenario, the clinician decides to use the Conners 3 (Conners, 2008), a widely used ADHD assessment tool published by Multi-Health Systems (MHS). According to the current (May 2022) MHS website for registered users, one can purchase test materials to have a client complete the self-report form, as well as forms to collect ratings from a parent and an observer (current employer). Assuming the clinician buys the forms in bundles of 25 and does their own scoring, the cost is approximately $12 (Canadian). For the second scenario, the clinician decides to use the EQ-i:2.0 (also published by MHS) and do a similar 360˚ evaluation: collecting self report information from the client, as well as observer ratings from a parent and the client’s current employer. One can only purchase the online form with an automated report, so the cost is approximately $260 (Canadian). For most health care professionals, as well as researchers and practitioners working in the non-profit sector, the inflated cost of assessment tools like the EQ-i:2.0 make them pretty much out of reach for research or clinical activities.
As someone who has spent their career in the non-profit sector, the cost of EI assessment tools has directly impacted my work in the health and wellness area. In the late 1990s my research group used commercially developed EI tools in our work on exploring barriers to young adults making the transition from secondary to post-secondary education (see Parker et al. 2018 for details). After several years of work, including early phases of longitudinal projects, we found that the escalated costs for the EI measures could not be sustained on university-based research budgets. We either had to drop using EI variables in our research, or find alternative tools. Rather than turn to research forms in the journal literature, which have well known psychometric problems (see Bru-Luna et al. 2021), we chose to develop our own “in-house” tools for measuring relevant competencies (see the paper by Crane and Henning in this issue for more details).
While the cost of assessment tools may have played an important role, I believe there is another important factor that has discouraged work on the EI construct by clinicians and health care professionals. As has been documented in detail elsewhere (see Keefer et al., 2018), the first generation of EI measures like the EQ-i (Bar-On, 1997), Petrides and Furnham’s Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue; 2001), and Schutte et al.’s SREIT (1998) were essential in helping to establish the empirical importance of the EI construct. Nevertheless, test development and validation is an ongoing process and I want to suggest that many widely used EI measures (both commercial and non-commercial) have not kept pace with important developments in the broader research literature. More specifically, I want to flag a problematic feature of most EI tools cited in this paper—they include mood or optimism items in the measurement of the EI construct.
There are some useful lessons for the authors and publishers of EI tools to be learned from the literature on alexithymia (a construct that has been widely embraced by mental health researchers and clinicians). As noted earlier, much of this interest comes from the fact that alexithymia has been found to predict many health and wellness variables (Bagby et al., 2020). At the same time, it is also commonly found that alexithymia measures correlate at least moderately with negative affect – a variable that typically goes hand and hand with physical and mental health problems. As a consequence of this potential confound, alexithymia researchers routinely control for negative affect when studying the impact of alexithymia on health and wellness variables (Lumley, Neely & Burger, 2007). The research goal is to statistically demonstrate that alexithymia remains uniquely predictive after removing the impact of negative affectivity.
There is something of a paradox in the EI literature, however, because not only do researchers using EI measures to study health and wellness variables rarely control for mood, but most self-report EI measures are contaminated by the way mood-related items are used. Widely used measures like the EQ-i, the EQ-i:2.0, the ESCI, and the TEIQue all include optimism and happiness items as part of various EI-related scales and subscales. Given the inclusion of state dependent mood and optimism on widely used EI measures, it should come as no surprise that clinical researchers and practitioners have tended to shy away from the EI construct.
As a researcher who has spent a large part of his career documenting the importance of EI-related constructs for health and wellness, the apparent lack of relevancy to the clinical psychology field is an unfortunate state of affairs. Although various EI models have been proposed since Salovey and Mayor (1990), it is worth noting that virtually all have important implications for broad mental health issues. As noted by Parker (2005), “the ability to identify and communicate internal mental states, the ability to link particular mental events with specific situations and personal behaviors, the ability to use information about feelings and emotions to guide future behavior, as well as the ability to mentally regulate negative or extreme emotional states, constitute core abilities in most models of emotional intelligence. The clinical implications of these types of abilities are vast” (p. 280).
It is unfortunate that widely used EI assessment tools come with features that discourage basic clinical research and applications. Will this trend change any time soon? Probably not, given that test publishers of EI measures (and those who have developed widely used research forms) do not appear to be in a hurry to “refresh” their tools. Unfortunately, while the last 30 years has seen an expansion of work on various emotion-related constructs in psychology and many allied fields (e.g., affect regulation, alexithymia, interceptive awareness, mindfulness, etc), time seems to have stopped at 1990 for many people in the EI subfield.