Social Intelligence
What is the Bar-On EQ-i? According to Reuven Bar-On, the Bar-On EQ-I is based on 19 years of research, and tested on over 48,000 individuals worldwide. The Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory is designed to measure a number of constructs related to emotional intelligence. A growing body of research suggests that emotional intelligence is a better predictor of “success” than the more traditional measures of cognitive intelligence (IQ). The Bar-On EQ-i consists of 133 items and takes approximately 30 minutes to complete. It gives an overall EQ score as well as scores for 5 composite scales and 15 subscales.
When psychologists began to write and think about intelligence, they focused on cognitive aspects, such as memory and problem-solving. However, there were researchers who recognized early on that the non-cognitive aspects were also important. For instance, David Wechsler defined intelligence as "the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment". As early as 1940 he referred to "non-intellective" as well as "intellective" elements, by which he meant affective, personal, and social factors. Furthermore, as early as 1943 Wechsler was proposing that the non-intellective abilities are essential for predicting one’s ability to succeed in life. He wrote: “The main question is whether non-intellective, that is affective and conative abilities, are admissible as factors of general intelligence. (My contention) has been that such factors are not only admissible but necessary. I have tried to show that in addition to intellective there are also definite non-intellective factors that determine intelligent behavior. If the foregoing observations are correct, it follows that we cannot expect to measure total intelligence until our tests also include some measures of the non-intellective factors” [Wechsler, 1943 #316, p. 103).
Wechsler was not the only researcher who saw non-cognitive aspects of intelligence to be important for adaptation and success. Robert Thorndike, to take another example, wrote about "social intelligence" in the late thirties. Unfortunately, the work of these early pioneers was largely forgotten or overlooked until 1983 when Howard Gardner began to write about "multiple intelligence." Gardner proposed that "intrapersonal" and "interpersonal" intelligences are as important as the type of intelligence typically measured by IQ and related tests.
When Salovey and Mayer coined the term emotional intelligence in 1990, they were aware of the previous work on non-cognitive aspects of intelligence. They described emotional intelligence as "a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action". Salovey and Mayer initiated a research program intended to develop valid measures of emotional intelligence and to explore its significance. They found in one study that when a group of people saw an upsetting film, those who scored high on emotional clarity (which is the ability to identify and give a name to a mood that is being experienced) recovered more quickly. In another study, individuals who scored higher in the ability to perceive accurately, understand, and appraise others’ emotions were better able to respond flexibly to changes in their social environments and build supportive social networks.
In the early 1990’s Daniel Goleman aware of Salovey and Mayer’s work, wrote the well known text “Emotional Intelligence.” Goleman was a science writer for the New York Times, whose area was brain and behavior research. He had been trained as a psychologist at Harvard where he worked with David McClelland, among others. McClelland was among a growing group of researchers who were becoming concerned with how little traditional tests of cognitive intelligence told us about what it takes to be successful in life.
IQ by itself is not a very good predictor of job performance. Hunter and Hunter estimated that at best IQ accounts for about 25 percent of the variance in job performance. Sternberg pointed out that studies vary and that 10 percent may be a more realistic estimate of the variance in job performance explained by IQ. In some studies, IQ accounts for as little as 4 percent of the variance in job performance.
An example of research demonstrating the limits of IQ as a predictor is the Sommerville study, a 40 year longitudinal investigation of 450 boys who grew up in Sommerville, Massachusetts. Two-thirds of the boys were from welfare families, and one-third had IQ’s below 90. IQ had only a small predictive relationship to how well they did at work or in the rest of their lives. Childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustration, control emotions, and get along with other people were far better predictors of how well the subjects did throughout their lives.
Another example is a study of 80 Ph.D.’s in science who underwent a battery of personality tests, IQ tests, and interviews in the 1950s when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Forty years later, when they were in their early seventies, they were tracked down. Estimates were made of their success based on resumes, evaluations by experts in their own fields, and sources like American Men and Women of Science. It turned out that social and emotional abilities were four times more important than IQ in determining professional success and prestige.
Research on EIQ (Emotional Intelligence) indicating a correlation with success do not necessarily mean that cognitive ability is irrelevant for success. As an example of the interplay between IQ and EIQ, a student needs a relatively high level of IQ merely to get admitted to a graduate science program at a school like Berkeley. Once you are admitted, however, what matters in terms of how you do compared to your peers has less to do with IQ differences and more to do with social and emotional factors. To put it another way, if you’re a scientist, you probably needed an IQ of 120 or so simply to get a doctorate and a job. But then it is more important to be able to persist in the face of difficulty and to get along well with colleagues and subordinates than it is to have an extra 10 or 15 points of IQ. The same is true in many other occupations.
Cognitive and non-cognitive abilities are related. There is research suggesting that emotional and social skills actually help improve cognitive functioning. For instance, in the famous "marshmallow studies" at Stanford University, four year olds were asked to stay in a room alone with a marshmallow and wait for a researcher to return. They were told that if they could wait until the researcher came back before eating the marshmallow, they could have two. Ten years later the researchers tracked down the kids who participated in the study. They found that the kids who were able to resist temptation had a total SAT score that was 210 points higher than those kids who were unable to wait.
Cognitive ability seems to play a more limited role in accounting for why some people are more successful than others. In doing the research for his first book, Goleman became familiar with a wealth of research pointing to the importance of social and emotional abilities for personal success. Some of this research came from personality and social psychology, and some came from the burgeoning field of neuropsychology. Here are few examples that deal specifically with the role non-cognitive abilities play in success at work.
The Value of Emotional
Intelligence at Work
Martin Seligman has developed a construct he calls "learned optimism". It refers
to the causal attributions people make when confronted with failure or setbacks.
Optimists tend to make specific, temporary, external causal attributions while
pessimists make global, permanent, internal attributions. In research at Met
Life, Seligman and his colleagues found that new salesmen who were optimists
sold 37 percent more insurance in their first two years than did pessimists.
When the company hired a special group of individuals who scored high on
optimism but failed the normal screening, they outsold the pessimists by 21
percent in their first year and 57 percent in the second. They even outsold the
average agent by 27 percent.
In another study of learned optimism, Seligman tested 500 members of the freshman class at the University of Pennsylvania. He found that their scores on a test of optimism were a better predictor of actual grades during the freshman year than SAT scores or high school grades.
The ability to manage feelings and handle stress is another aspect of emotional intelligence that has been found to be important for success. A study of store managers in a retail chain found that the ability to handle stress predicted net profits, sales per square foot, sales per employee, and per dollar of inventory investment.
Emotional intelligence has as much to do with knowing when and how to express emotion as it does with controlling it. For instance, an experiment done at Yale University by Sigdal Barsade involved a group of volunteers playing the role of managers who come together in a group to allocate bonuses to their subordinates. A trained actor was planted among them. The actor always spoke first. In some groups the actor projected cheerful enthusiasm, in others relaxed warmth, in others depressed sluggishness, and in still others hostile irritability. The results indicated the actor was able to infect the group with his emotion, and good feelings led to improved cooperation, fairness, and overall group performance. Objective measures indicated the cheerful groups were better able to distribute the money fairly and in a way that helped the organization. In a study with similar findings, Bachman found that the most effective leaders in the US Navy were warmer, more outgoing, emotionally expressive, dramatic, and sociable.
Empathy is a particularly important aspect of emotional intelligence. Researchers have known for years that empathy contributes to occupational success. Rosenthal and his colleagues at Harvard discovered over two decades ago that people who were best at identifying others’ emotions were more successful in their work as well as in their social lives. A survey of retail sales buyers found that apparel sales reps were valued primarily for their empathy. The buyers reported that they wanted reps who could listen well and really understand what they wanted and what their concerns were.
The notion that social or emotional intelligence is important is somewhat simplistic and misleading. Both Goleman and Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso have argued that by itself emotional intelligence probably is not a strong predictor of job performance. Rather, it provides the bedrock for competencies that are strong predictors of job performance. Goleman has tried to represent this idea by making a distinction between emotional intelligence and emotional competence. Emotional competence refers to the personal and social skills that lead to superior performance in the world of work. Emotional competencies are linked to and based on emotional intelligence. A certain level of emotional intelligence is necessary to learn emotional competencies. For instance, the ability to recognize accurately what another person is feeling enables one to develop a specific competency such as Influence. Similarly, people who are better able to regulate their emotions will find it easier to develop a competency such as Initiative or Achievement Drive. Ultimately social and emotional competencies need to be identified and measured to predict performance. EIQ, (Social or Emotional Intelligence) appears to be linked to competencies which predict success.
There is no body of research linking successful child custody conflict determinations to EIQ (emotional intelligence). Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that parents able to engage in and thus use and model high EIQ (emotional intelligence) should be more likely to nurture more appropriate and successful child adjustments; impart high EIQ to their children, all of which would be likely, everything else being equal, to positively influence the prospects for their children. I believe that along with other psychometric measures, interview data and collateral sources of information, EIQ should be measured, evaluated and integrated within the totality of all available child custody determinative factors, and in turn used to develop best possible, best interests forensic child custody, co-parenting, decision making, recommendations.
An additional issue regarding the usefulness of EIQ in forensic child custody cases involves making recommendations for improving EIQ, and thus improving the prospects for children who are already disadvantaged due to marital dissolution and their parents’ continued conflict. At the end of each Bar-On EIQ section there is a section for improving EIQ tailored to the specific needs of each parent as determined by their individual Bar-On EIQ profiles.
Higher standard scores are associated with greater levels of emotional intelligence and better performance. 100 represents effective emotional functioning. Scores greater than 100 represent good emotional functioning, and scores of less than 100 indicate areas that may be improved.
Note: Much of the following was excerpted from “Emotional Intelligence: What it is and Why it Matters,” written by Cary Chernis, PhD., and from the State University of New Jersey’s Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations Web Site.
http://www.eiconsortium.org/research/what_is_emotional_intelligence.htm