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Emotional intelligence has been popularly portrayed as critical to human success and sometimes even more important than IQ (e.g., D. Goleman, 1995), yet sparse evidence exists supporting such a claim. The purpose of this study was to measure emotional intelligence, as conceptualized by J. D. Mayer and P. Salovey (1997), in order to better understand its contribution to the success of gifted adolescents. An adolescent version of the unpublished Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS-A) was used to measure emotional intelligence, while measures of interpersonal relations, social stress, and grade point average were utilized to gauge success. Thirty-nine gifted adolescents (mean age = 16.5) participated. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that emotional intelligence did not significantly contribute to the social and academic success of these adolescents. Recommendations for future research in this area are provided, including suggestions for designing studies that could be more practical for educators and other helping professionals.
The concept of emotional intelligence became popularized by the publication of Daniel Goleman's (1995) best-selling book on this construct and many subsequent magazine and newspaper articles (e.g., Henig, 1996; Peterson, 1997). These publications captured the imagination of the media and the general population by claiming extraordinary predictive validity for emotional intelligence. Goleman argued that general intelligence (IQ) typically predicts only about 20% (r = .45) of the variance that determines various domains of life success, leaving about 80% to other factors. Moreover, he professed his belief that many of these "other" factors are related to a construct that has been termed emotional intelligence. Goleman also detailed his belief that emotional intelligence can sometimes be more powerful than IQ - that it can contribute greatly to several important life outcomes including improved learning, less aggression, better decision making, and many other characteristics that imply successful living. In fact, he claimed that increasing emotional intelligence leads to "advantage in any domain in life" (p. 36).
Although Goleman's (1995) work has brought a great deal of attention to the construct of emotional intelligence, the grandiosity of his claims has been questioned by the originators of the term "emotional intelligence" (Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2000). Those researchers have addressed several potential problems.
First, Mayer et al. (2000) highlighted how Goleman's...