Is Emotional Intelligence good for your health? Well it seems so according to a meta-analytical study carried out by Nicola Schutte and her associates. What is a meta-analytical study? It involves combining a number of studies that all focus on a similar area and analyzing their pooled results to draw an overarching conclusion.
In this study, looking at Emotional Intelligence and health, the authors combined a number of research studies for a total of 7,898 participants. The studies looked at different measures of Emotional Intelligence that included the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i®), the Assessing Emotions Scale, and the Trait Meta Mood Scale.
The researchers discovered that there was a relationship between Emotional Intelligence and health: a correlation of .29 with mental health; .31 with psychosomatic health, and .22 with physical health. To simplify, Emotional Intelligence as measured here accounts for approximately 9% of the variance in mental health; just over 9% with psychosomatic health; and 4% for physical health.
Those were the results when studies using all three measures were combined. The authors also concluded that the EQ-i had a significantly stronger association with mental health than the other measures, which, once again, speaks to the broad applicability of this assessment.
Reference:
Schutte, Nicola S1; Malouff, John M1; Thorsteinsson, Einar B1; Bhullar, Navjot1; Rooke, Sally E1A meta-analytic investigation of the relationship between emotional intelligence and health. Personality and Individual Differences. Vol 42(6), Apr 2007, pp. 921-933
