What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is the ability to notice, understand and manage emotions, both your own and other people's, and to use that information to guide what you do. People high in it tend to read a room well, stay steady under pressure and handle tricky conversations with care. It's a set of skills and habits that you can practise, not a measure of how nice you are.

The term was introduced into academic psychology by Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990. It's been popularised since then, and some claims have gone well beyond the evidence. We'll cover what's solid and what isn't.

What emotional intelligence covers

It helps to break EQ down into four areas:

• Self-awareness: knowing what you're feeling and why.
• Self-management: handling your reactions, including staying calm and following through.
• Social awareness: picking up on what others feel, including what they're not saying.
• Relationship skills: using all of the above to communicate, repair and work through disagreement.

These don't always travel together. You might read other people brilliantly and be baffled by your own moods. You might know exactly what you feel and still say the thing you'll regret. It's also not the same as emotional stability. Someone can feel things intensely and be very skilled at handling those feelings, and someone can be calm and still miss what's going on around them.

How emotional intelligence shows up

At work

You may notice that a colleague's short email is about stress rather than you. You pause before replying to something that annoyed you. You give feedback in a way that people can actually use, and you can tell when a meeting needs a break. Managers with these skills can raise issues early, while they're still small.

Lower EQ at work doesn't look like villainy. It might look like a brilliant person who doesn't realise why their team has gone quiet, or someone who snaps under pressure and doesn't know how much it's affected everyone. Direct feedback can help a lot here. Try our guide on how to ask for honest feedback.

In love

Emotional skills matter here more than almost anywhere. They help you say "I'm scared" rather than "you never listen", notice a partner's mood without making it about you and make a genuine repair after a fight. They also help you know when to stop talking for the night. If closeness feels safe, as it does with a secure attachment style, this may come more easily, but you can practise it from any starting point.

With friends

Emotionally skilled friends know when to give advice and when to just turn up with food. They can notice when you've gone quiet in a group. They can also tell you that you've hurt them without blowing things up. If that's not you yet, one great place to start is by asking, "Do you want ideas, or do you want me to just listen?"

Strengths and watch-outs

If you lean high, your strengths include empathy, calm and influence. You probably smooth things over, and people trust you. The watch-outs are that you may carry everyone's feelings, or end up managing other people's moods at your own expense. Skill with emotions can also be used to steer people, so check that you're being straight with them. Setting limits and being clear about what you want are part of emotional intelligence as well.

If you lean low, your strengths may include directness, focus and a clear head when others are overwhelmed. You may be less swayed by drama. The watch-out is missing signals that matter, then being surprised by the fallout. Some simple practices can help: name your feeling once a day, ask one more question before giving advice, and ask a trusted person what you tend to miss.

How to work with someone high or low in emotional intelligence

Someone high in emotional intelligence

• Be honest. They'll probably notice if you aren't, and it saves time.
• Tell them directly if they're managing you, and ask for plain speaking.
• Check that they're okay too. Those who look after others can go unnoticed.

Someone lower in emotional intelligence

• Say what you need in plain words. Hints and sighs may not register.
• Give specific feedback on impact: "When you interrupted, I stopped contributing."
• Assume good intent where you reasonably can. They may care a great deal and not show it.
• Remember that skill can grow, so notice and thank them for progress.

These skills matter when you're in the thick of it, too. The collaborating conflict style is hard to pull off without them.

Research notes

• Origins. Salovey and Mayer (1990) set out a framework of skills for appraising, expressing and regulating emotions and for using feelings to plan and motivate. Mayer, Caruso and Salovey (2016) later updated this ability model and discussed where it sits among other mental abilities.
• Different things share the name. Researchers separate ability-based EI, measured with tests that have right and wrong answers, from self-report and "mixed" measures that also include things like motivation and personality. Joseph and Newman (2010) noted the confusion that comes from this shared label. Self-report questionnaires, including ours, tell you about how you see yourself, not your tested ability.
• Job performance. O'Boyle and colleagues (2011) found corrected correlations of about .24 to .30 between EI and job performance across three research streams. Joseph and Newman (2010) found that ability-based EI predicted performance positively in jobs high in emotional labour, and negatively in jobs low in it. So EQ matters at work, and how much depends on the job. It isn't the magic ingredient some headlines suggest.
• Love. Malouff, Schutte and Thorsteinsson (2014) pooled six studies with 603 participants and found a link (r = .32) between trait EI and romantic relationship satisfaction, for both the person and their partner. It's a small body of evidence, and it's correlational.
• It can be trained. Mattingly and Kraiger (2019) combined 58 studies and found a moderate positive effect from training, across study designs and types of measure, though effects were larger in published studies than dissertations.

To go deeper on the first skill, read what emotional self-awareness means, and to compare what you see with how others see you, try Second Sight.

Measure your emotional skills

Some of us think we're better at this than we are, and some of us are harder on ourselves than we need to be. Take the Emotional Intelligence Expedition to see how you score on self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. It takes about six minutes and uses Selfcarta's own questions, which haven't yet been independently validated. It's a useful mirror rather than a test of your worth.