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K.V. PETRIDES, ADRIAN FURNHAM and NORAH FREDERICKSON orgue for a trait approach to the misunderstood construct.
FEW constructs have grabbed the attention of researchers, theorists and practitioners with such intensity and suddenness as emotional intelligence (El). Inevitably this has led to problems in the theoretical development of EI as well as in the way practitioners have sought to measure and apply it in various domains (Matthews et ai, 2002). Nearly 15 years after the first formal definition and model of EI, scientific research in the field still lags behind popular, quasi-academic and commercial speculations.
It is clearly important that psychologists catch up. Specifically with respect to limitations at the applied end, qualified practitioners should try to keep abreast of relevant research findings in order to avoid involvement in unprofitable applications. This article seeks to make a germane contribution by outlining both the fundamentals and the latest research in the field of El. We address several issues, including those of conceptualisation, measurement and application in the educational, occupational and clinical domains.
Origins of El
The roots of EI can be traced back to E.L. Thorndike's (1920) social intelligence and Gardner's (1983) intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. The term 'EI' itself was discussed in the literature several times before Salovey and Mayer proposed the first formal definition and model of the construct in 1990. This early model was soon followed by several alternative conceptions (e.g. Bar-On, 1997; Mayer & Salovey, 1997). The most influential, and the one mainly responsible for launching the field, was Goleman (1995).
Each of the various EI models in the literature comprised many different components. Petrides and Furnham (2001) identified via content analysis 15 distinct components common to more than one salient EI model. Table 1 presents a brief description of these components, which have provided the basis for the development of our operational definition of EI that we will discuss later.
Soon after the early models emerged, the first EI measures began to appear in the literature (e.g. Schutte et al., 1998). However, the lack of a coherent operational framework, led to the haphazard development of the construct and numerous apparently conflicting findings. And there was another serious problem: early models and measures of EI did not consider the fundamental difference between...