Emotional intelligence is…?

Eighty-four tertiary students completed questionnaires measuring emotional intelligence (EI), personality, affiliation, abstract reasoning ability, emotional knowledge, and task orientation. Among personality variables, extraversion and agreeableness correlated moderately with total Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS) (p<0.01), and weakly (p<0.05) with openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. TMMS was also correlated with emotional knowledge (p<0.01) but not with abstract reasoning or interest in affiliation. Results from the same sample with the Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) revealed inconsistencies between the two EI scales. Thus, openness, extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism and interest in affiliation were not significantly related to the MSCEIT, but agreeableness and emotional knowledge (p<0.01) and abstract reasoning ability (p<0.05) were. Results also found that EI as estimated by the TMMS, but not the MSCEIT, was correlated with task orientation (p<0.01); but this effect disappeared when personality was controlled for. Taken as a whole, the differential performance of the TMMS and MSCEIT supports a proposal for two distinct types of EI: trait EI and ability EI (Petrides & Furnham, 2000).