Assessing the predictive validity of emotional intelligence
Section snippets
The incremental validity of emotional intelligence
Goleman (1995) suggested that successful life outcomes are more a function of emotional rather than cognitive intelligence. He proposed several definitions for this construct, including “a set of abilities which include self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself” (p. xii); and the ability to “control impulse and delay gratification, to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think, to empathize, and to hope” (p. 34).
The success of
Method
Participants consisted of 180 students (118 women and 62 men) who were enroled in introductory psychology courses at a Canadian university. They were told that their participation would involve completing several personality and intelligence inventories and that they would receive bonus points for course credit. The average age of respondents was 21 years old (ranging from 17 to 56). Participants were enroled in either the Science, Arts, or Commerce faculties, and approximately one-third of the
Correlates of academic achievement
Table 1 presents the means and standard deviations for the study variables along with intercorrelations among the GPA, the Wonderlic, the five factors of the 16PF, and the EQ-i total score and its five composite factors. As expected, GPA was significantly correlated with the Wonderlic and with the Extraversion and Self-Control factors of the 16PF. That is, individuals who had higher cognitive ability, who were more introverted, and who had higher self-control, tended to have higher GPAs.
Discussion
The initial purpose of this study was to examine the incremental validity of emotional intelligence in predicting academic achievement. However, when the correlation matrix was examined, further analyses were unwarranted. These results provide no support for claims of emotional intelligence’s (as assessed by EQ-i) ability to predict academic achievement. That is, in contrast to reports in the EQ-i manual (Bar-On, 1997), neither the total EQ-i score, nor the five factors, were related with
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers who provided constructive comments to an earlier version of this paper.
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