Self-report measure

Emotional Intelligence Scales

Emotional Intelligence uses 68 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess 7 named scales.

You learn how skilled you are at noticing, understanding and handling emotions.

For anyone who wants to know how well they read and manage emotions in themselves and others.

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Pay $6 before you start. The full report and PDF are included.

Your answers stay private.

It comes from emotion research on the skills of understanding and using feelings well.

Sample result, example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

What this test is

Welcome. Emotional Intelligence uses 68 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess 7 named scales.

The measure

It has 68 items, each answered on a 5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate) scale. Its scores cover Responsive Distress, Empathic Concern, Attention to Emotions, Responsive Joy, Emotion-based Decision, Negative Expressivity and Positive Expressivity.

Public-domain items from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, L. R., 1999; ipip.ori.org). Scale membership and reverse-keying taken verbatim from Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items). Construct names from ipip.ori.org.

At a glance

Items

Response scale

5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate)

Est. time

~10 min

Subscales

Access

Pay before you start · $6, or $3 to repeat · full report and PDF included

What it measures

Seven tendencies describe how a person relates to emotion. Attention to Emotions concerns noticing one's own feelings; Positive Expressivity and Negative Expressivity concern showing happy and unhappy feelings openly; Responsive Joy and Responsive Distress concern being moved by others' happiness and others' sorrow; Empathic Concern concerns caring about people in difficulty; and Emotion-based Decision-making concerns relying on feelings when choosing what to do.

Salovey and Mayer (1990) introduced emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive, understand and manage emotion in oneself and others. Barchard (2001) assembled self-report scales for several of its components from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), distinguishing tendencies that earlier measures had combined.

Each tendency is scored separately. Higher scores describe stronger attention to, expression of or responsiveness to emotion in that particular way; lower scores describe a more reserved or less emotion-led style. The scales describe typical tendencies, not tested abilities, so they show how a person usually relates to emotion rather than how accurately they read it.

The scales are used in research on emotion and relationships, and in coaching and personal development. On this site, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) describes how emotions are managed, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) Battery separates components of empathy, and the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) treats empathy as one trait.

Origins and lineage

'Emotional intelligence' entered the research literature when Salovey and Mayer (1990) proposed a framework for the abilities involved in appraising, regulating, and using emotion. The construct's scientific career has been shaped ever since by a measurement argument: whether emotional intelligence is an ability to be tested against correct answers, as Mayer, Caruso, and Salovey (1999) argued it must be to count as an intelligence, or a self-attributed disposition to be inventoried like personality.

The IPIP catalogues her seven component scales, and this collection administers them in full.

The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) version used here

These scales are original public-domain IPIP items — Barchard's own operationalization, not an imitation of any proprietary emotional-intelligence test. Scale membership and reverse-keying follow Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items) verbatim, with construct names as catalogued at ipip.ori.org.

It measures self-reported emotional tendencies, not tested emotional ability.

Nomological network

These scales measure self-reported ways of noticing, expressing and responding to emotions, such as attention to emotions, empathic concern and emotional expressivity (Goldberg et al., 2006). A meta-analysis found that self-reported emotional intelligence predicts job performance and converges substantially with personality traits and self-efficacy (Joseph & Newman, 2010).

Self-report emotional intelligence is more closely related to personality than to cognitive ability, which supports its discriminant separation from ability-based tests of emotional skill (Joseph & Newman, 2010).

Subscales

Responsive Distress 10 items

Empathic Concern 10 items

Attention to Emotions 10 items

Responsive Joy 10 items

Emotion-based Decision 9 items

Negative Expressivity 10 items

Positive Expressivity 9 items

Example item

“Am calm even in tense situations.”

Very InaccurateModerately InaccurateNeither Accurate nor InaccurateModerately AccurateVery Accurate

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Scoring & interpretation

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.

References

Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.
Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D. R., & Salovey, P. (1999). Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence. Intelligence, 27(4), 267–298.
Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public-domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde, I. Deary, F. De Fruyt, & F. Ostendorf (Eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe (Vol. 7, pp. 7–28). Tilburg University Press.
International Personality Item Pool. A Scientific Collaboratory for the Development of Advanced Measures of Personality Traits and Other Individual Differences. https://ipip.ori.org/
Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. G. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 84–96.
Joseph, D. L., & Newman, D. A. (2010). Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 54–78.

Sample report preview

The report opens with a profile of your scores on the 7 scales (Responsive Distress, Empathic Concern, Attention to Emotions, Responsive Joy, Emotion-based Decision, Negative Expressivity, and Positive Expressivity), drawn on a common scale so the overall shape of the profile is visible at a glance. Each scale then receives a short plain-language explanation of what a higher or lower standing describes. It closes with guidance on reading the results and on the limits of self-report.

Report contents
Section	What it shows
Subscale scores	Your score on each of the 7 subscales.
Comparisons	How your scores compare with a published comparison group.

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