Emotional Intelligence: a Component of Personality or Intelligence?

Abstract

Emotional Intelligence is a concept which has grown increasingly prevalent in both popular and academic psychology over a number of years, yet the precise conceptualisation of the construct and it’s operationalisation is yet to be standardised. The main problem is the distinction between ability based theories and trait based theories of EI and their operationalisation. The cognitive elements of Ability EI seems to be at odds with the personality related elements of Trait EI, and although the two show strong relationships with intelligence and personality respectively, they maintain a weak relationship with one other. The present study examines the relationship of both with intelligence and personality measures within a questionnaire design. Our findings appear reliable and they mostly support the existing data, concluding that Trait EI may be so closely correlated with personality that it should potentially not be considered as a separate construct. We identified an element of Ability EI in our testing which appears to be unrelated to intelligence, this suggests that although Ability EI is closely correlated to general intelligence, it should not be incorporated into the positive manifold structure of general intelligence as it is not a pure measure of cognitive ability. Further research is needed to confirm these findings.