Emotional intelligence tests: what EQ is and how it is measured

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence, usually shortened to EQ or EI, is the name for a set of capacities: noticing what you and other people are feeling, telling one feeling from another, understanding how feelings build and fade, and using that information when you decide something or handle a relationship. The idea is intuitive, which is part of why it spread so fast outside research.

Inside research it splits into two quite different things that share a name (Mayer, Salovey & Caruso, 2008; Petrides & Furnham, 2001). One is an ability, like verbal reasoning: something you can be better or worse at, tested with items that have answers. The other is a cluster of emotion-related self-perceptions and dispositions, which behaves like a personality trait rather than a skill. The distinction is not academic housekeeping. The two are scored differently, relate to different things, and answer different questions about you.

So when someone reports an EQ score, the first useful question is which of the two traditions produced it.

What is the difference between ability EI and trait EI?

Ability EI treats emotional understanding as a form of intelligence. Its tests use performance items, scored against expert or consensus judgement, in the way a vocabulary test is scored. Mayer, Salovey and Caruso define emotional intelligence as the capacity to carry out sophisticated information processing about emotion and to use that information to guide thinking and behaviour, and they report that EI conceived as an ability shows incremental validity for socially relevant outcomes (Mayer et al., 2008). Their four-branch account covers perceiving emotion, using emotion to assist thinking, understanding how emotions combine and change, and managing emotion in yourself and others.

Trait EI takes the other route. Petrides and Furnham argued that what self-report questionnaires capture is not an ability at all but a set of emotional self-perceptions, and that these sit inside established personality space rather than inside the space of cognitive abilities (Petrides & Furnham, 2001). On that view a high score means you see yourself as emotionally capable. That is worth knowing, and it is not the same claim as being demonstrably good at reading a room.

What does the research say about EQ and job performance?

The most cited meta-analysis on this question pooled the available studies and modelled the paths by which emotional intelligence might reach job performance (Joseph & Newman, 2010). Two things are worth carrying away from it, and both are best held loosely, since a meta-analysis summarises the studies that happen to exist rather than closing a question.

First, the mixed measures of EI, the kind that blend self-perceptions with dispositions, did explain variance in job performance beyond cognitive ability and the Big Five, so they are not simply personality under another name. Second, ability-based EI behaved differently depending on the job: it predicted performance positively in roles with high emotional labour, where managing your feelings and other people's is a core part of the work, and negatively in roles with little emotional labour.

That is a modest claim, and it is the honest one. Effects in this literature also vary with which instrument a study used, so results are not always comparable across tests. A page that tells you EQ matters more than ability or predicts most of your career success is selling something rather than reporting a finding.

Why do most free EQ tests measure personality instead?

Almost every free emotional intelligence test online is a self-report questionnaire. You read statements such as I can usually tell when a friend is upset, and rate how accurate each one is. That is the trait EI method, and it inherits the trait EI overlap.

Scores from those questionnaires sit inside established personality space rather than alongside cognitive abilities (Petrides & Furnham, 2001), overlapping with three of the broad dimensions lexical and questionnaire research settled on decades ago (Goldberg, 1993): Emotional Stability, which is steadiness under emotional pressure, Agreeableness, which is warmth, sympathy and cooperation, and Extraversion, which is energy and confidence in company. If you take a free EQ test and a Big Five inventory in the same afternoon, expect them to tell you overlapping things.

This is a description rather than a complaint. The trait version is still informative. But the Big Five version of the same information has a larger evidence base behind it and names its parts, so you can see whether a high EQ score is coming from calmness, from warmth, or from social confidence. Those three have quite different consequences, and a single blended number hides which one you have.

What does a good EQ test look like?

• It states which model it uses, ability or trait, instead of blurring the two.
• It asks several items per scale. Reliability rises with the number of items (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994), and very abbreviated measures understate how much traits matter (Credé et al., 2012).
• It reports subscales rather than one blended number, so you can see where a score comes from.
• It compares your answers to a stated reference sample and says how that sample was gathered.
• It publishes its reliability and validity evidence, or names the published instrument it was built from.
• It describes what the result is for, and stops well short of predicting your career or your relationships from it.

A test that hands back one number, calls it your EQ, and tells you the number beats cognitive ability for life outcomes has told you more about its marketing than about you. The useful output of an emotional intelligence questionnaire is a profile with parts you recognise, which you can then check against how your week actually went.

How does Wellington measure this?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

Wellington does not report an EQ score, because the evidence sits better with the underlying traits. The free Snapshot is 60 questions and takes about 7 minutes, and it measures only the six broad dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility. Two of those cover most of the ground an EQ questionnaire covers, Emotional Stability and Agreeableness, and each comes back as a written page for your band rather than a bare number. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked; after question ten you sign in with an email so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. There is no card.

The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters, to reach 90 traits. That set includes every Big Five facet and all 24 VIA character strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), among them Social-Emotional Intelligence, Compassion and Kindness. It also adds facet-level traits such as Trait Calmness, which is how settled you feel before anything happens, Trait Warmth, which is how openly you show affection, and Tender-Mindedness, which is how far your judgements bend toward mercy.

The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, also adds a short weekly module over 104 weeks toward all 255 traits across eight domains. One of those domains is emotional functioning, and it is where the EQ-shaped traits live: Emotional Awareness, Emotional Equanimity, Emotional Recovery, Emotional Intensity Tolerance, Cognitive Empathy, Affective Empathy and Empathic Concern. Each trait is the average of several statements on a five-point accuracy scale, placed against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands, Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. Our norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time. If you want to see how it is scored first, see the methodology.

Questions people ask

Is there a free EQ test that is worth taking?

Several free questionnaires are decently built, and the honest ones say they measure trait emotional intelligence by self-report. Treat the result as a description of how you see your own emotional life. For the same information with more evidence behind it, a Big Five inventory that reports Emotional Stability and Agreeableness separately will usually tell you more.

Can you raise your emotional intelligence?

The skills that sit under the label, naming what you feel, pausing before reacting, checking your read of someone rather than assuming it, do improve with practice. Trait scores move slowly, and personality traits shift modestly with sustained effort rather than quickly. Expect change over months of deliberate practice, not over a weekend workshop.

Is EQ more important than IQ?

No good evidence supports that claim. The meta-analytic work found that mixed emotional intelligence measures add something beyond cognitive ability and the Big Five, while ability-based emotional intelligence predicted job performance positively only in emotionally demanding roles, and negatively in roles with little emotional labour (Joseph & Newman, 2010). The slogan is older and louder than the data.

Does Wellington give me an emotional intelligence score?

Not as a single number. The free Snapshot reports Emotional Stability and Agreeableness, which carry most of what EQ questionnaires measure, and the Wellington Membership adds facets and character strengths including Social-Emotional Intelligence and measures the emotional functioning traits individually, such as Emotional Awareness and Cognitive Empathy.