Try your hand at a few sample ability items from an emotional intelligence test. These sample items won’t give you an estimate of your actual skill level, but they will give you a feel for the way scientists measure emotional skills.
Measuring Your Ability to Read People
The ability to identify emotions means that you are able to gauge accurately how another person feels.
What’s the Answer?
An initial look at this face leads most of us to say that she is feeling happy. After all, that’s quite a smile! She must be happy, perhaps excited. It’s a fairly easy task to cross out some emotions. We can quickly dispense with sadness and disgust.
Let’s make this a bit harder. Look at the face again. Now ask whether she really feels happy or not. Is she smiling out of happiness? Is it a real smile?
When we are asked a follow-up question about the genuineness of her emotional expression, we need to go back and take a longer, more critical second look. It is this analysis that requires our critical emotional skills—those that do not merely identify surface emotion in others but go deeper as we compare different features of her face. We ask what a real smile consists of and whether our target person displays these components.[4] In this example, the smile is mirrored by her eyes. Hers is probably a real smile, not a posed smile. ( Happiness, and perhaps Excitement, would be the best responses.)
Measuring Your Ability to Get in the Right Mood
The next EI test question is about feelings and whether they matter. Do you know how feelings change the way we think, plan, and decide?
How Sadness Influences Thinking.
Imagine that you are feeling somewhat down (sad) right now. Which of the following tasks would you best accomplish in such a mood?
- Writing a thank-you note
- Proofing a budget
- Calling a friend to wish her happy birthday
What’s the Answer?
Down or negative moods such as sadness focus our attention. We attend more carefully and critically to details. We easily seek and find errors and problems. Being in a sad mood can be helpful if our task is to proof a document such as a budget.
Note that we are not talking about depression, when a person finds it hard to function or to care about what he or she is doing. This ability helps us to match feelings with thinking tasks.
Measuring Your Ability to Predict the Emotional Future
Understanding emotions is the ability to recognize the causes of emotions, how emotions change, and how complex emotions are combined from two or more simple emotions. One way to estimate a person’s level of skill in this area is to ask emotional vocabulary questions.
Emotion Vocabulary.
Sorrow most closely combines which two feelings? Choose the best option:
a. Anger and surprise
b. Fear and anger
c. Disappointment and acceptance
d. Remorse and joy
What’s the Answer?
Why do people feel sorrow? They feel sorrow when they experience a loss, whether a death, a loss of an idea, a chance, or a dream. They are disappointed about not getting something they had hoped for. Disappointment in turn can lead to frustration, a subtle form of anger. It is when we realize that the loss is unavoidable and come to accept the loss that our disappointment merges into a feeling of sadness. This is a very sophisticated form of reasoning. (Option “c” is the best response.)
Measuring Your Ability to Do It with Feeling
How should emotions be managed? Is there a better or worse way to help others? The test sample attempts to measure your ability to manage emotions effectively.
Effective Emotion Management Strategies.
One of your colleagues at work looks upset and asks if you will eat lunch with him. At the cafeteria, he motions for you to sit away from the other diners. After a few minutes of slow conversation, he says that he wants to talk to you about what’s on his mind. He tells you that he lied on his résumé about having a college degree. Without the degree, he wouldn’t have gotten the job. Which of the following would be most likely to result in having your colleague immediately feel better about the situation?
- Ask him how he feels about it so you can understand what’s going on. Offer to help him, but don’t push yourself on him if he really doesn’t want your help.
- Have him share all the possible negative consequences of his act. Get him to work through what the worst outcome could be so he realizes that the situation may not be as bad as he thinks.
- Quickly change the subject and do not deal with his issue right now. Getting his mind off the problem is the best thing to do.
What’s the Answer?
Perhaps none of these options really grabs you. Although we might believe that suppressing the issue—not thinking about it—can have immediate positive results, it may be one of the ways to cause your colleague greater distress. Telling someone not to think about an issue can focus even more attention on the problem.[5] Entering into imaginary, negative outcomes may heighten his or her worry and concern. Talking it through in a supportive manner may be the best option (Answer 1).
Deciding on the most effective solution in such a problem depends in large measure on the goal. You must start with identifying what your objective is in the situation, and then you can weigh various alternatives. In many cases, the emotionally intelligent alternative is the one in which the underlying emotions are processed and can inform your thinking and reasoning. As uncomfortable as this may feel, it is necessary. Our thinking can lead us down all sorts of dead-end paths, whereas clear emotional data hold the key.