Emotional Intelligence Tests: What They Measure and Whether They Work
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Quick answer
An emotional intelligence test measures how well you perceive, use, understand and manage emotions. There are three quite different kinds — ability tests that score your answers against a key, self-report questionnaires that ask you to rate yourself, and mixed models that blend emotion skills with personality traits. They disagree with each other, they are not interchangeable, and only one of them is testing an ability at all.
The three kinds of emotional intelligence test
Almost every disagreement about emotional intelligence dissolves once you notice that the word names three different things, measured three different ways. Researchers call these streams.
| Stream | What it treats EI as | How it is measured | Leading instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Ability EI | A form of intelligence about emotions | Performance tasks scored against a key | MSCEIT (Mayer–Salovey–Caruso) |
| 2. Trait EI | A cluster of self-perceptions and dispositions | Self-report questionnaire | TEIQue (Petrides) |
| 3. Mixed models | Emotion skills plus motivation, wellbeing and social competence | Self-report or 360-degree rating | EQ-i 2.0 (Bar-On); ESCI (Goleman/Boyatzis) |
Why this matters before you take a test
Stream 1 asks what you can do. Streams 2 and 3 ask what you think you can do. Those are different questions, and a person can score high on one and low on the other without either result being wrong.
Ability tests: the MSCEIT
The Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test is the flagship of the ability approach. It follows the four-branch model that Mayer and Salovey set out in the 1990s, treating emotional intelligence as a genuine intelligence with distinguishable components.
- Perceiving emotion — identifying emotion in faces, images and voices.
- Facilitating thought — knowing which moods help which kinds of thinking.
- Understanding emotion — knowing how emotions combine, escalate and change over time.
- Managing emotion — choosing effective ways to regulate feeling in yourself and others.
The tasks are performance tasks. You are shown a face and asked how much anger it contains; you are given a scenario and asked which action would best sustain a person's good mood. Your answers are compared against a key.
The scoring problem, and how it was fixed
That last sentence conceals the hardest question in the field. Where does the key come from? For an arithmetic item, the correct answer is a fact. For “how much sadness is in this face”, there is no fact of the matter to appeal to.
The original MSCEIT answered with consensus scoring. Your response was scored against what most people said, or against what a panel of emotions experts said. The objection was immediate and serious: a test scored by majority opinion rewards typicality, not skill, and might systematically penalise the very people who read emotions unusually well. Empirical work bore this out — consensus methods agreed well on easy items and failed to identify the best answer on difficult ones, which are precisely the items that should discriminate.
The MSCEIT 2 response
The second edition moved away from consensus. Its items are keyed to findings in emotions research, with experts working from a corpus of published studies rather than voting on their impressions. That is a substantive answer to the central criticism, and it is rarely mentioned on pages describing “the emotional intelligence test”.
Self-report tests: TEIQue, EQ-i 2.0 and the personality problem
Most emotional intelligence tests you will encounter — in a workplace training day, in a magazine, on a free website — are self-report questionnaires. You rate statements such as “I usually know why I feel the way I do” on a scale.
Petrides and Furnham drew the crucial distinction in 2001. A self-report instrument cannot measure an ability, because you are reporting a belief about yourself rather than demonstrating a skill. What it measures is a constellation of emotion-related self-perceptions. They named it trait emotional intelligence and located it, deliberately and explicitly, within personality space rather than within the space of cognitive abilities.
This is not a criticism of trait EI. It is a definition of it. The criticism is reserved for instruments that measure trait EI and then present the result as though it were an ability score.
What your self-report score largely reflects
Scores on self-report emotional intelligence questionnaires correlate substantially with established personality traits — particularly emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion and conscientiousness. A high score tells you something real. Much of what it tells you was already measurable with a personality inventory.
Does emotional intelligence predict anything?
Yes, and the pattern of what predicts what is the most revealing result in the literature.
O'Boyle and colleagues meta-analysed the relationship between emotional intelligence and job performance across all three streams in 2011. All three correlated with performance, with corrected correlations between roughly .24 and .30. That is a respectable effect by the standards of organisational psychology.
The interesting finding was which stream added the most once cognitive ability and the Big Five personality traits were already in the model. It was not the ability test. Streams 2 and 3 — the self-report and mixed measures — showed the greatest incremental validity beyond IQ and personality.
How to read that result
It is genuinely ambiguous. One reading: self-report EI captures something real that IQ and the Big Five miss. Another: self-report performance measures share method variance, because the same person often supplies both the EI rating and the performance rating. The meta-analysis is consistent with both, and this remains unsettled.
“EQ matters more than IQ” — what was actually claimed
Daniel Goleman's 1995 book carried the subtitle Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, and that clause has been doing heavy lifting ever since.
The specific claim usually attributed to him is that emotional intelligence accounts for 80% of success and IQ for 20%. What Goleman wrote is that IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, leaving 80 percent to other forces. Those other forces are everything else in a human life — family, wealth, health, temperament, opportunity, luck, and, in his argument, emotional competence. They are not a synonym for emotional intelligence, and the book does not claim they are.
So the popular version overstates a claim its author did not quite make, in support of a conclusion the evidence does not quite support. Emotional intelligence predicts job performance. So does general cognitive ability, and across most complex work it does so more strongly. The two are not in competition, and the framing that puts them there is a marketing artefact rather than a research finding.
There is no such thing as an EQ score
IQ is a specific technical object: a deviation score with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, obtained by administering a test to a stratified standardisation sample. The number means something because the sample means something.
“EQ” has no equivalent. The term was coined for symmetry and popularised by journalism. Different emotional intelligence instruments report on different scales, against different reference groups, measuring partly different constructs. A score of 115 on one is not comparable to 115 on another, and neither is comparable to an IQ of 115.
Free online EQ tests
A free browser questionnaire has no norm sample, no validation study and no published reliability. At best it is a structured prompt to reflect on how you handle emotions, which has some value. It is not a measurement, and no number it produces should be reported anywhere it might be believed.
Myths and facts about emotional intelligence tests
| Myth | Fact |
|---|---|
| EQ is measured like IQ | There is no standardised EQ scale. Instruments differ in construct, scale and reference group, and none is normed as an intelligence test is. |
| Emotional intelligence tests measure an ability | Only ability tests such as the MSCEIT do. Self-report questionnaires measure self-perceptions, which is what trait EI was defined to be. |
| Goleman showed EQ accounts for 80% of success | He wrote that IQ contributes about 20% to life success, leaving 80% to all other forces — not to emotional intelligence specifically. |
| The MSCEIT is scored by popular vote | It was, and the criticism was fair. The MSCEIT 2 replaced consensus scoring with keys derived from emotions research. |
| A high self-report EI score proves emotional skill | It correlates heavily with emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Much of the score is personality by another name. |
| EQ matters more than IQ at work | Meta-analysis finds EI correlates around .24–.30 with job performance. General cognitive ability predicts complex job performance more strongly. |
Frequently asked questions
What is an emotional intelligence test?+
It is an instrument that assesses how well a person perceives, uses, understands and manages emotions. There are three kinds: ability tests such as the MSCEIT that score performance against a key, self-report questionnaires such as the TEIQue that measure emotion-related self-perceptions, and mixed models such as the EQ-i 2.0 that combine emotion skills with personality and wellbeing.
Is there an official EQ test like an IQ test?+
No. IQ is a deviation score with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, obtained from a representative standardisation sample. No emotional intelligence instrument is normed that way, and scores from different EI tests are not comparable with each other or with an IQ score.
What is the most valid emotional intelligence test?+
For emotional intelligence as an ability, the MSCEIT is the established instrument, and its second edition addressed the long-standing criticism of consensus scoring by keying items to emotions research instead. For emotional intelligence as a personality trait, the TEIQue is the best-validated self-report measure. They are measuring different constructs, so neither is simply better.
How is the MSCEIT scored?+
The original MSCEIT used consensus scoring: your answer was compared against what most respondents, or a panel of experts, chose. Critics objected that majority opinion rewards typicality rather than skill, and research showed consensus methods could not reliably identify the best answer on difficult items. The MSCEIT 2 moved to keys derived from published emotions research.
Do emotional intelligence tests just measure personality?+
Self-report ones largely do. Trait emotional intelligence was explicitly defined by Petrides and Furnham as sitting within personality space, and scores correlate substantially with emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion and conscientiousness. Ability tests such as the MSCEIT measure something distinct, though they correlate modestly with cognitive ability.
Does emotional intelligence predict job performance?+
Yes, modestly. O'Boyle and colleagues' 2011 meta-analysis found corrected correlations of roughly .24 to .30 with job performance across all three research streams. The self-report and mixed measures showed the greatest incremental validity beyond cognitive ability and the Big Five, though whether that reflects real signal or shared method variance remains debated.
Did Goleman say EQ is more important than IQ?+
Not in the form the claim usually takes. His 1995 book argued that IQ contributes roughly 20 percent to the factors determining life success, leaving 80 percent to other forces — a category that includes family, health, opportunity and chance as well as emotional competence. The popular “EQ accounts for 80% of success” is a distortion of that sentence.
Are free online EQ tests accurate?+
No. A free questionnaire has no normative sample, no published reliability and no validation evidence. It may be a useful prompt for self-reflection, but it does not measure emotional intelligence in any technical sense and its numerical output should not be treated as a score.
Sources
This guide draws on standard psychometric references and peer-reviewed research:
- 1.Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2008). “Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits?” American Psychologist, 63(6).
- 2.“Measuring emotional intelligence with the MSCEIT 2: Theory, rationale, and initial findings.” Frontiers in Psychology (2025).
- 3.“Consensus scoring, correct responses and reliability of the MSCEIT V2.” Personality and Individual Differences (2009).
- 4.O'Boyle, E. H., Humphrey, R. H., Pollack, J. M., Hawver, T. H., & Story, P. A. (2011). “The relation between emotional intelligence and job performance: A meta-analysis.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(5), 788–818.
- 5.Petrides, K. V., & Furnham, A. (2001). “Trait emotional intelligence: Psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies.” European Journal of Personality, 15(6), 425–448.
- 6.Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
- 7.Neisser, U., et al. (1996). “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.” American Psychologist, 51(2). APA.
- 8.American Psychological Association (APA)
Sources are provided for further reading. Organization links point to official sites; academic works are cited in full. See our research standards and editorial team.
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