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research-article2016
EMR0010.1177/1754073916650562Emotion ReviewBarchard et al. Taking Stock and Moving Forward
Introduction
Taking Stock and Moving Forward: 25 Years of
Emotional Intelligence Research
Kimberly A. Barchard
Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA
Marc A. Brackett
Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Yale University, USA
José M. Mestre
Department of Psychology, University of Cádiz, Spain
In the last 25 years, research on emotional intelligence (EI) has
flourished. Numerous theories, models, and measures have been
developed, and there is substantial evidence that EI predicts
important life outcomes in the areas of health, education, relation-
ships, and the workplace. This special issue considers the state
of the field and provides suggestions for further advances.
In their landmark 1990 article, Salovey and Mayer provided
the first formal definition of EI, as “the ability to monitor one’s
own and others’ feelings, to discriminate among them, and to
use this information to guide one’s thinking and action” (p. 189).
They also speculated that EI might be related to personality
traits such as empathy. In 1995, Daniel Goleman, a New York
Times journalist, wrote a bestselling trade book on EI, which led
to great interest among educators, business professionals, psy-
chologists, and researchers.
In 1997, Mayer and Salovey refined their definition to focus
exclusively on four emotion-related abilities: perceiving, using,
understanding, and managing emotions. Shortly after, other
researchers asserted that EI can be conceived as a constellation
of emotion-related personality traits (Petrides & Furnham,
2000). This led to two primary research streams: ability EI, con-
sisting of discrete emotional skills, measured with performance
assessments; and trait EI, consisting of dispositions related to
emotions and emotional self-efficacy, measured with self-report
instruments.
Corresponding author: Kimberly A. Barchard, Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Email: kim.barchard@unlv.edu
Emotion Review
Vol. 8, No. 4 (October 2016) 289­
© The Author(s) 2016
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073916650562
er.sagepub.com
This special issue revisits and updates these core conceptual-
izations of EI. The seven papers and six commentaries address
long-standing issues, including the theory and measurement of
EI, validity of different instruments, and how EI is situated
among different models of emotion, intelligence, and personal-
ity. We hope that these articles provide insights that contribute
to the next generation of advancements in the field.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam
Books.
Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence? In
P. Salovey & D. Sluyter (Eds.), Emotional development and emotional
intelligence: Educational implications (pp. 3–31). New York, NY:
Basic Books.
Petrides, K. V., & Furnham, A. (2000). On the dimensional structure of
emotional intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 29,
313–320. doi:10.1016/s0191–8869(99)00195–6
Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination,
Cognition, and Personality, 9, 185–211. doi:10.2190/dugg-p24e-52wk-
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