Key research papers on emotional intelligence

How the literature is organised

Salovey and Mayer (1990) presented emotional intelligence as a set of skills for appraising and expressing emotion accurately, regulating it effectively, and using feelings to motivate, plan and achieve. Mayer, Caruso and Salovey then argued that it meets the traditional standards for an intelligence (Mayer et al., 1999), and Mayer, Salovey and Caruso (2000) compared the models that had appeared by then.

The division between ability and trait still organises the literature. Petrides and Furnham (2001) set out the theoretical foundation of trait emotional intelligence as a constellation of traits and self-perceived abilities and located it in relation to established personality factors. Llamas-Díaz et al. (2022) distinguish three families of measure in the studies they pool: performance-based ability, self-report ability and self-report mixed. Say which kind your scale is.

Main debates

The long-running debate is what emotional intelligence is and whether it is an intelligence at all, which is the claim in the title of Mayer et al. (1999). Mayer, Roberts and Barsade (2008), in the Annual Review of Psychology, review three approaches and conclude that specific-ability and integrative-model approaches conceptualise and measure it adequately. A practical consequence is that you should not pool findings from different kinds of measure without checking, as Llamas-Díaz et al. (2022) do, whether the type of measure moderates the result.

Where recent work is heading

Recent citations cluster around applications: leadership in schools and work teams, nursing education, the wellbeing of health-care staff and adolescent adjustment. Reviews published since 2021 cover measures (Bru-Luna et al., 2021), school leaders (Gómez-Leal et al., 2022) and adolescent wellbeing (Llamas-Díaz et al., 2022). When the list was compiled, an editor left out some highly cited recent records whose citation counts looked implausible for their venue and age. Check the journal before you rely on any recent paper, here or elsewhere.