Many emotional intelligence (EI) scales have been found to overlap with personality scales and it has been argued that EI scales are measuring personality. In the present study it was hypothesised that EI would explain unique variance in life satisfaction beyond that predicted by personality, IQ, and control variables. A community sample (N = 191) aged 18–79 years (M = 35.94, SD = 14.17) was recruited. Because IQ showed no bivariate relationship with life satisfaction, IQ was not used in further analyses. After controlling for marital status and income, personality accounted for an additional 34.2% of the variance in life satisfaction, and total EI scores accounted for a further 1.3% (p < 0.05). Further analysis revealed that the additional variance was explained by the EI dimension of Emotional Management. In a competing analysis, EI explained 28.3% of the variance at step 2, and personality accounted for a further 8.8% of the variance at step 3. It was concluded that EI predicted some unique variance in life satisfaction, and that there was substantial conceptual overlap between EI and personality. However, it is argued that, rather than being redundant, emotional intelligence may offer valuable insights to current conceptions of personality.
The concept of emotional intelligence (EI; Salovey & Mayer, 1990) has received increasing attention over the past decade. Mayer and Salovey (1997) identified four components of EI, involving the ability to perceive and express emotion, to access and use emotions to facilitate thought, to understand emotions, and to manage emotions. A growing body of research has found links between EI and a wide range of important life outcomes that are not adequately predicted by traditional measures of intelligence. However, many EI scales have been found to overlap with personality scales and some have argued, therefore, that they are measuring personality traits. This issue is complicated by the different models and measures of EI, which fall into two broad categories: mixed models and ability models. Because mixed models include a variety of traits, this may account for the overlap between personality and EI. The aim of this study was to determine whether EI predicted unique variance in life satisfaction (LS) beyond that explained by personality and IQ, using a scale based on the ability model of EI.
Emotional intelligence has been theoretically linked with life satisfaction (e.g., Bar-On, 1997, Goleman, 1996 and Mayer et al., 2000a), and some researchers have empirically explored the relationship between EI and individual differences in LS, finding significant correlations ranging from r = 0.11 to r = 0.45 ( Bar-On, 1997 and Ciarrochi et al., 2000; Mayer et al., 2000b and Palmer et al., 2002). Ciarrochi et al. (2000) further discovered that EI accounted for variance in LS after controlling for IQ and personality variables. Conversely, scores on the Twenty-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20; Bagby, Parker, & Taylor, 1994), which measures an inability to evaluate and verbally express emotions, correlated negatively with LS.
As noted however, there are a number of different theories and measures of EI to consider when evaluating research on emotional intelligence. Models of EI have been classified as ‘ability’ models and ‘mixed’ models. Ability models (e.g., Mayer & Salovey, 1997) aim to measure EI as a set of abilities that result from the adaptive interaction between emotions and cognition, whereas mixed models have been so named because they include a broader range of traits and dispositions (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2000c).
