If you can’t ask people how smart they are, and you can’t ask others how smart you are, how can we find out whether you are smart or not? Well, what if we wanted to know how fast you could type? In this case, we would probably administer a typing test; you’d be given a few pages and asked to type them up. We would count the number of words you typed correctly, and that would be your typing skill, or typing speed. Next, by giving a typing test to a large and representative sample of people, we would be able to gauge your typing ability relative to other people’s ability. We could, in effect, compute your Typing Quotient, or TQ.
Emotional skills can also be measured in an objective way through the use of ability, performance, or knowledge tests. Such tests would ask a series of questions like these:
- What is the cause of sadness?
- What is an effective strategy for calming an angry customer?
This is more or less what the Mayer, Salovey, Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (the MSCEIT) does. The MSCEIT (pronounced mess-keet) asks people to solve emotional problems, and the correctness of the answers is evaluated. In turn, a person’s scores are compared to a large, normative database (from the general public or from emotions experts) to compute a sort of emotional skill quotient. Although we could call this score an EQ, we prefer to call the scores an emotional intelligence quotient or EI score. The term EQ is often used to refer to the non-ability-based approaches to assessing emotional intelligence.