ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss a theoretical model that views emotional intelligence as a set of interrelated abilities involved in perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions. These abilities rely on knowledge of emotional processes and information-processing skills. They are thought to develop through learning and experience and are amenable to training. In relation to broader conceptions of emotional intelligence encompassing personality traits and motivational factors, the model we adopt has two advantages. One is that it can stimulate more focused research aimed at understanding the information-processing skills and strategies that underlie emotional intelligence. Another advantage is that it paves the way for assessing emotional intelligence through performance tests that measure people's actual rather than self-perceived abilities. This helps to overcome the limitations of self-report measures, which assess self-perceived abilities. These tend to overlap with well-established measures of personality traits and are prone to self-enhancement and faking. Research based on performance measures has yielded substantially different findings from that based on self-report measures of emotional intelligence.
