Emotional Intelligence Scales

This 68-item collection measures seven components of emotional functioning identified in Kimberly Barchard's (2001) research on emotional and social intelligence — Attention to Emotions, Emotion-based Decision, Empathic Concern, Negative Expressivity, Positive Expressivity, Responsive Distress, and Responsive Joy — using the public-domain IPIP scale keyed to each component.

'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.

Barchard's (2001) dissertation took the taxonomic route: assemble self-report scales for distinct candidate components — attention to emotion, expressivity, empathy, emotion-guided deciding, and emotional reactivity — and examine their place in the nomological network of established personality and ability constructs. The IPIP catalogues her seven component scales, and this collection administers them in full.

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.

Each component is reported against Eugene–Springfield Community Sample reference values in the norms section. It measures self-reported emotional tendencies, not tested emotional ability.

“Am calm even in tense situations.”

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

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a population percentile against the cited reference sample, with a reliability-based confidence range where α is published.

Norms computed from the Eugene-Springfield Community Sample (ESCS) — Lewis R. Goldberg’s adult community panel from Eugene and Springfield, Oregon (Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/UF52WY). This is a community sample and is NOT nationally representative. The mean, standard deviation, reference N and Cronbach’s α were computed directly from the raw IPIP item-level responses on THIS scale’s exact item set and reverse-keying (complete cases); reference N varies by scale and is shown with each scale below. The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from that computed α.

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.