Notes on keeping a journal · · 7 min read
Emotional intelligence test: what the free scales measure and what they cannot tell you
Free EQ tests are self-report, not measurement. How the Schutte scale, TEIQue and MSCEIT differ, a self-check on the four branches, and which branch a journal trains.
- emotional intelligence test
- emotional intelligence
- EQ test
- emotion diary
- self-assessment
Imagine you take a free "EQ test" in ten minutes, score 127, and close the tab feeling good. A week later you take another one on the same site and get 104. What changed in a week? Nothing. The questions changed, and both times you were answering the same underlying question: "how well do you think you understand feelings?"
That does not make such tests useless. It means they measure something other than what the number on the screen promises. Below: what emotional intelligence is, which scales exist, which of them are free to use, and where a journal fits into any of this.
Where the idea came from
In 1990 Peter Salovey and John Mayer published the paper that first defined emotional intelligence as an ability: to perceive emotions in yourself and others, to use them in thinking, to understand where they come from and how they develop, and to manage them. Four branches, in that order. Noticing comes before understanding. Understanding comes before managing.
Five years later Daniel Goleman's book made the letters EQ famous and blurred them at the same time: optimism, motivation and social skills got folded in. That is how two different things ended up under one name. Mayer, Salovey and Caruso called it the split between "ability" and "a set of traits" in 2008, and the argument is still going.
For you as a reader this matters for one reason. When a website says "emotional intelligence test", it does not say which of the two it is measuring. The difference is large.
Two kinds of test, and the free one is almost always the second
Ability tests are built like an exam. You are shown a face and asked which emotion is on it. You read a situation and pick the action most likely to soften someone's hurt. There are right answers (set by the agreement of a large sample and of experts). The main one, the MSCEIT, is sold by Multi-Health Systems, is administered by trained people, and is not available free online.
Self-report questionnaires ask how much you agree with statements like "I easily understand what the people around me feel". The Schutte scale from 1998 has 33 such statements, is free for research, and is what most free online tests paraphrase. Konstantinos Petrides' TEIQue is longer and finer, free for academic use, licensed for commercial use. Both are honest instruments with real validation. But you are the one answering.
That is the catch. A person who is bad at noticing their own emotions does not know they are bad at it. They will tick "agree" next to "I understand my feelings well" with the same confidence as someone who actually does.
In the meta-analysis, "mixed" EQ questionnaires overlapped heavily with Big Five personality traits and self-efficacy, while ability tests measured something separate from them.
Put plainly, a free test largely tells you how extraverted, how neurotic and how self-confident you are. That is information too. Just not the information in the headline.
What a free test can still do
Three useful things, if you treat it as a mirror rather than an instrument.
A snapshot of self-image. How you see yourself handling feelings today. That is not nothing: a gap between your self-rating and what people close to you say is worth thinking about on its own.
Differences between subscales. If the test breaks down into noticing, understanding and managing, the profile is more interesting than the total. "I read other people but miss my own" is common, and it is specific.
A repeat six months later. Same questionnaire, two sittings, time in between. A change in self-rating is more reliable than a single number.
What a test cannot do: compare you to other people to the point, predict your career, or diagnose anything. If the site says otherwise, that is marketing.
A self-check on the four branches: 12 statements
Since an honest free test is a mirror of self-image anyway, it may as well be built on the original model rather than on someone else's questionnaire under someone else's licence. Below are twelve statements, three per branch of Salovey and Mayer's model. They are our wording, not the Schutte scale and not the TEIQue, and they have no validation behind them. They also have no total score: the result is a profile, which branch you rate as stronger and which one lags, in your own opinion. Answer about the last month.
Self-check
Four branches of emotional intelligence: 12 statements
This is not a test and not a measurement: the statements are ours, not a licensed scale, and you are the one answering. The result shows how you see yourself on Salovey and Mayer's four branches, with no total score. Answer about the last month, not the ideal version of you.
1.I notice an emotion at the moment it appears, not an hour later.
2.I know which state I think best in, and I pick tasks to match it.
3.I can explain where my emotion came from, not just that it is there.
4.In a hard conversation I can hold a pause instead of answering at once.
5.I can name what I feel more precisely than "fine" or "bad".
6.When I am irritated, I can point it at the task rather than at people.
7.I tell close feelings apart: hurt from anger, anxiety from tiredness.
8.I can sit with a heavy feeling without suppressing it or taking it out on others.
9.From a person's face and voice I can tell what is going on before they say it.
10.I notice how my mood shapes my decisions, and I account for it.
11.I can see one emotion turning into another, for example fear into irritation.
12.I can help someone else calm down without dismissing what they feel.
If the profile is flat and "mostly yes" everywhere, reread the paragraph about the self-report trap above. If one branch sits clearly below the others, the rest of this piece is about what to do with it.
Which branch a journal trains
Honestly: I could not find a study where keeping a journal raised an EQ test score. If you find one, write to me. There is something else, and it is closer to the point.
The first branch in Salovey and Mayer's model is perceiving your own emotions. In a 2001 study by Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues, people described their states several times a day for two weeks. Those who distinguished unpleasant emotions more finely (anger, guilt and disappointment as different things, not one "bad") used a wider range of ways to cope in hard moments. That is not an EQ test. It is the first branch, measured through the words a person chooses.
An emotion diary does exactly that. It does not score you on a scale; it makes you find the word. Four lines per entry: what happened, what I felt, where it sits in the body, what I was missing. I wrote about how to keep one separately.
A self-check without a test: four questions for one week
If you want something more honest than a questionnaire, take the four branches and one week. Every evening, one line per question.
What did I feel most strongly today, in one word? If the word is "fine", try again.
When did an emotion help me think, and when did it get in the way? Irritation finally made me write the email; anxiety stopped me sending it.
Where did it come from? Not "my colleague" but what exactly landed: unfairness, fear of running late, tiredness.
What did I do with it? Swallowed it, said it, waited it out, took it out on someone else. No grade for whether that was right.
After a week, read the seven entries in a row. The empty lines will show which branch is weak, more precisely than any score. For the person who wrote "fine" seven times, it is the first branch. For the person who described other people's feelings in detail seven times and their own not once, it is also the first, just better hidden.
What to do with the result
Nothing heroic. The number from a free test is a photograph of your idea of yourself, taken in ten minutes. A month of entries is the same thing on video, and on video you can see what you do rather than what you think of yourself.
If you really want a measurement, take the Schutte scale or the TEIQue today, put the result in your journal, and come back to it in six months, after months of entries. The difference in score will prove nothing rigorous. The difference in the words you reach for will be visible without any test.
Sources
- Salovey, P., Mayer, J. D. Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211, SAGE (1990)
- Schutte, N. S. et al. Development and validation of a measure of emotional intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 25(2), 167–177, Elsevier (1998)
- Petrides, K. V., Furnham, A. Trait emotional intelligence: psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies. European Journal of Personality, 15(6), 425–448, Wiley (2001)
- Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D. R. Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits? American Psychologist, 63(6), 503–517, American Psychological Association (2008)
- Joseph, D. L., Newman, D. A. Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 54–78, American Psychological Association (2010)
- Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., Benvenuto, M. Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it. Cognition & Emotion, 15(6), 713–724, Taylor & Francis (2001)