Emotional Intelligence
Read, manage and use emotions, yours and others'
Free, no account needed.
Emotional intelligence is the set of skills that lets you notice, understand and work with emotions, your own and other people's. This test follows Daniel Goleman's five domains: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill. It shows which domain is your strongest, how the five compare, and where you have the most room to grow.
Most items are statements to rate. Several describe everyday situations: choose what you would most likely do, not what sounds best. Honest answers give a far more useful picture than flattering ones.
What it measures
Self-awareness
Recognizing your own emotions as they happen, understanding what triggers them, and knowing your strengths and limits.
Low: Feelings often reach you late or blurred: you may be upset for a while before you know why.
High: You notice your emotions as they arise, name them precisely and see how they shape your choices.
Self-regulation
Managing emotions and impulses: pausing before reacting, calming yourself down and adapting to change.
Low: Strong feelings tend to drive your words and actions, and they can take a long time to settle.
High: You keep a space between feeling and action, calm yourself well and adapt when plans change.
Motivation
Putting emotion to work for goals: drive from within, persistence after setbacks and hope when progress is slow.
Low: Your drive depends a lot on outside pressure, and setbacks or slow progress can sap it quickly.
High: You are driven from within, learn from failure and stay hopeful through long, slow stretches.
Empathy
Sensing and understanding what other people feel, including what they do not say.
Low: Other people's feelings can be hard to read, and you tend to focus on what is said rather than felt.
High: You pick up unspoken feelings, listen for meaning and understand people even when you disagree.
Social skill
Handling relationships well: raising hard topics, resolving conflict, giving feedback and bringing people together.
Low: Conflict and tricky conversations are hard to steer, and your good intentions do not always come across.
High: You handle touchy conversations, settle conflicts and help groups pull in the same direction.
Possible results
About this test
Emotional intelligence became a scientific concept in 1990, when Peter Salovey and John Mayer defined it as the ability to monitor your own and other people's feelings, tell them apart and use that information to guide thinking and action; they later refined it into four abilities: perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. The psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman popularized the idea in his 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence and later applied it to work and leadership. His framework, used here, has five domains: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill.
Researchers distinguish two kinds of EI. Ability EI is measured with performance tests, such as the MSCEIT, that pose emotional problems with better and worse answers. Trait EI, developed by K. V. Petrides and colleagues, is a person's self-perceived emotional skills and dispositions, measured by questionnaires. The two correlate only modestly. Trait EI overlaps substantially with the Big Five (especially emotional stability, extraversion and agreeableness), and the popular claim that EI matters more than IQ for success is not supported by the evidence, though EI does predict well-being, relationship quality and some aspects of job performance.
This test is a trait-style self-report: original agree-disagree items plus everyday situations whose more emotionally skilled responses raise your scores. Each domain is scored from 0 to 100 relative to the range of possible answers, not population norms, and your overall score is the mean of the five. Self-report has clear limits: people with the least emotional insight may also be the least able to judge it, and most of us rate ourselves kindly. Treat the result as a starting point; how people who know you well see you is a valuable second opinion.
References
- Salovey, P. & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185-211.
- Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.
- Goleman, D. (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence.
- Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P. & Caruso, D. R. (2008). Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits? American Psychologist, 63(6), 503-517.
- Petrides, K. V. & Furnham, A. (2001). Trait emotional intelligence: Psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies. European Journal of Personality, 15(6), 425-448.
- Joseph, D. L. & Newman, D. A. (2010). Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 54-78.
For self-reflection and curiosity, not diagnosis. Scores describe how you answered, relative to the possible range; they are not compared with population norms.
Emotional Intelligence
About 7 minutes · 42 questions
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