Theory and Measurement of Trait Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the operationalization of emotional intelligence as a personality trait (trait EI or trait emotional self-efficacy), which has emerged as the dominant approach to the study of EI and one of the most rapidly developing subdomains of personality research. Trait EI is defined as a constellation of emotional perceptions located at the lower levels of personality hierarchies. Essentially, the construct concerns people's perceptions of their emotional abilities. We present a detailed description of the 15 distinct facets comprising the trait EI sampling domain. Subsequently, we discuss the position of the construct within mainstream personality hierarchies with parallel reference to the emerging literature on the General Factor of Personality. We continue with a presentation of salient measures of trait EI, focusing specifically on a review of their incremental validity, i.e., the extent to which each of these measures can predict criteria of interest over and above a range of cognate constructs, such as the Big Five personality dimensions. We conclude by highlighting the main characteristics and advantages of trait EI as a scientific theory.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.