Emotional intelligence and emotional information processing

The relationships amongst emotional intelligence (EI) assessed by questionnaire, psychometric intelligence, performance on tasks in which emotional information is processed and performance on non-emotional tasks were studied. Participants (N = 95) completed two questionnaire EI measures and also performed several inspection time (IT) tasks involving the processing of both emotional and non-emotional information. An unspeeded emotion-recognition task and an assessment of fluid ability (Raven’s matrices) were also included. Females were found to perform better than males on two of the emotion-related tasks, and performance on all the IT tasks was found to be negatively related to age. Structural equation modelling showed that the associations amongst emotion task performance, non-emotion task performance and Raven’s score could be accounted for by two correlated factors: a ‘speed’ factor with high loadings from non-emotional IT task performance scores and Raven’s score and an ‘emotion’ factor with high loadings from emotion task performance scores. Interpersonal EI as assessed by one of the two scales was found to be positively and significantly correlated with a composite emotion task performance score. The results of this study suggest that performance on emotion-related tasks can be linked to the information-processing approach to psychometric intelligence.