Ability EI as an intelligence? Associations of the MSCEIT with performance on emotion processing and social tasks and with cognitive ability

Abstract

Associations among the MSCEIT, a broad-bandwidth measure of ability emotional intelligence (EI), self-report EI, social perception ability, psychometric intelligence and performance on inspection time (IT) tasks, which assessed the speed of processing of emotional and non-emotional information were investigated in two student samples (N=99, 199). The main findings were that MSCEIT scores were unrelated to fluid ability or speed of non-emotional information processing as assessed by IT, but evidence for associations of MSCEIT scores with crystallised ability was found. Positive associations were found between MSCEIT scores, self-report EI and some emotion/social task scores. The results suggest that EI as assessed by the MSCEIT has some properties of an intelligence and is more closely related to crystallised than to fluid ability. The relatively small MSCEIT/g c correlations suggest that the MSCEIT is not a pure ability measure, although restriction of range in the samples used may also be relevant. More work, and the development of new measures, is required to determine whether performance EI has a fluid component.