Does Emotional Intelligence Assist in the Prediction of Academic Success?

Abstract

Some authors have claimed that emotional intelligence predicts success at work, at school, and in relationships, as well as or better than IQ. Little research exists to support or refute this claim at present. In this study, the ability of emotional intelligence to predict academic achievement was examined in a sample of undergraduate psychology students, using year-end grades as the criterion. The predictive validity of emotional intelligence was compared with the predictive validity of traditional cognitive abilities and the Big Five dimensions of personality. In addition, the incremental predictive validity of each of these three domains was assessed. In this setting, only some measures of Emotional Intelligence predicted academic success, and none of these measures showed incremental predictive validity for academic success over and above cognitive and personality variables. It may be that the overlap between many emotional intelligence measures and traditional measures of intelligence and personality limits their incremental predictive validity in this context.

The Role of Trait Emotional Intelligence in Individual Performance: A Descriptive Study in Albaha University, Saudi Arabia

“…It examined potential difference between male and female students in means on emotional intelligence. Evaluation of correlational test revealed that contrary to studies indicating a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and academic performance as measured by grade point average [3] [33], the current study did not find a significant association between emotional intelligence and academic performance [10] [27]. Nor was there difference between male and female students in means on emotional intelligence.…”

“…emotional intelligence, would respond to the given questionnaire blurredly, which in turn, leading to an unexpected results. Second, as [10] pointed out, if a large number of emotional intelligence measures are applied without preselecting, these measures would not predict academic performance. He concluded that cognitive ability and the personality domain do a far better job predicting academic performance.…”

“…It should be noted that the concept of EI is overlapping with other constructs, namely, social intelligence (the ability to understand others and act wisely in social circumstances), empathy (the ability to understand others' feelings and the trend to experience others' emotions vicariously), and alexithymia (difficulty to understand to describe feelings), and emotion regulation (the ability to regulate ones' emotions as desired). Surprisingly, the tests that were initially applied to measures these four constructs are currently often applied to measure EI [10]. Moreover, each theoretical paradigm conceptualizes EI from one of three perspectives, namely ability, mixed model, or trait.…”

“…Findings from earlier studies show variation, depending on the control variables that were included in the research models. In the academic realm, some researchers have found a relationship between EI and individual performance (GPA; [6] [16] [17] [25]; however, other researchers have found no significant relationship between these two variables after controlling for general mental ability and personality [10] [26]. [16] claimed that researchers have not carefully taken into account the description and comparison of different types of individual performance that may be related to EI, although performance is known to be a multidimensional construct.…”

Identification of Emotional Intelligences Level through Brainstorming Method and Its Impact on Students' Academic Achievement

“…In a fatherly attempt to explore the importance of other factors in student achievement, study related to emotional intelligence (EI) and academic achievement appears [28,29,30,31,32]. The above data are similar to that described studies that the role of emotional intelligence is very influential on the achievement of students' academic achievement.…”