A brief analysis of 20 years of emotional intelligence: an introduction to assessing emotional intelligence: theory, research, and applications

Abstract

Interest in Emotional Intelligence can, in part, be gauged by the amount of research activity it has stimulated since first making an appearance in the psychological literature about 20 years ago. To set the scene for the chapters that follow in this book we analyzed the number of theory, research, and application papers that have been published on EI by year and subject area. As shown in the tables below, there has been an increasing amount of empirical data and commentary published on the topic of EI, especially since the start of the 21st Century. What stands out is the number of published commentaries of the construct of EI with particular reference to how EI relates to standard psychological measures and constructs. In some ways, our review of the published material on EI illustrates a considerable diversity of opinion in which there is a solid stream of papers criticizing and or critically examining the construct validity of EI as well as a strong and growing arm of research evaluating how EI might be used in various applications across the workplace, health and educational settings. Clearly the conjecture over the reliability and validity of current measures as well as the construct validity of EI is not slowing the amount of research, the number of special issues or interest in EI from a very wide range of disciplines and practice areas (e.g., psychology, medicine, industry, education, neuroscience, etc.). Although measures of EI are at a fairly preliminary phase in their development (first or second versions are available for most measures), research on the applications of EI scores across several applied areas is on in earnest