Emotional Intelligence tests

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions, as well as to recognize and respond appropriately to other people's. The concept, popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman building on the academic work of Peter Salovey and John Mayer, changed how personal and professional success are understood: IQ alone isn't enough, how we handle emotions matters just as much, if not more.

The model describes five components:

• Emotional self-awareness: recognizing what you feel.
• Self-regulation: managing those emotions without letting them run the show.
• Motivation: channeling emotions toward goals.
• Empathy: recognizing other people's emotions.
• Social skills: managing relationships well.

It isn't a fixed profile: each component can be trained on its own.

"Emotional hijacking" and the marshmallow experiment

Goleman illustrates self-regulation with what he calls an "emotional hijacking": the amygdala, the brain structure that processes fear and other alarm signals, can trigger an automatic reaction (fight, freeze, or flight) before the brain's more reflective part even has time to size up the situation. Noticing that instant is a first step toward not getting stuck in it. He also draws on psychologist Walter Mischel's famous marshmallow experiment, in which a child's ability to delay an immediate reward predicted, years later, better academic and social outcomes, as an argument that self-regulation can be trained from an early age.

Our test is a popular-science, informational take inspired by this model: it doesn't replace a professional psychological assessment or a clinically validated emotional intelligence test.

Sources

• Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
• Greenberg, L. S. (2000). Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings.
• Mischel, W. (2014). The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. Little, Brown and Company.
• Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. Penguin Press.