Validation of an Emotional Intelligence Scale: A case of an African Sample

Abstract

There has been serious effort to develop scales to measure emotional intelligence since the firstmeasure of an aspect of emotional intelligence – the perception of affective content in ambiguousvisual stimuli (Mayer, DiPaolo, & Salovey, 1990) – was reported in a scientific journal (Mayer, Caruso,& Salovey, 2000). The studies were done in relation with a number of variables such as academicachievement (Newsome, Day, and Catano, 2000); leadership (Humphrey, 2002); personality (Lopes,Salovey, and Straus, 2003; Newsome et al. 2000); sex (Charbonneau and Nicol, 2002; Saklofske,Austin, and Minski, 2003), and IQ (Saklofske et al., 2003).