High-EQ personality

A “‘high-EQ personality’” (“EQ” stands for “emotional quotient”) is characterized by high adjustment, sociability, sensitivity, and prudence. High-EQ people have lower levels of creativity and innovation potential, difficulty giving and receiving negative feedback, reluctance to ruffle people’s feathers, a well-developed ability to manipulate others, and an aversion to risk.

A high-EQ girl can at first seem like a borderline personality disorder (BPD) girl, but the difference is that unlike the BPD girl, she will not have sex with an incel. This is because her tendency is to resist her impulses and make measured decisions, rather than idealizing a man she barely knows and impulsively jumping on his dick.

Also, unlike BPD, having a high EQ is not considered a mental illness, because people with a high EQ can function quite well in society in roles that play to their strengths. They are less likely to engage in overtly self-destructive behavior; if anything, what will sabotage them is their tendency to err on the side of safety.

Criticism of the concept of EQ

Many contemporary psychometricians think the term ‘EQ’ is either invalid or just describing already well known cognitive/personality constructs in a confused way. They think EQ term is hinting at something they regard as more scientifically consistent or valid, called the General Factor of Personality or GFP. The GFP also has its criticisms, particularly along the lines of allegedly being too linked to eugenics, though the same criticisms can be leveled at the broadly accepted big five model of personality, and indeed much of modern psychology, given the contribution of people linked with eugenics to these things.

EQ is typically depicted as a mixture of the ability to ‘perceive and understand’ other’s emotional states and the ability to manage one’s emotional states, on the other hand.

These two sub-factors of EQ or EI (emotional intelligence) can be thus separated into ability (emotional recognition capability) EI and trait EI (the ability to manage one’s emotional states and respond appropriately to the emotional states of others). The first facet of EQ, ability EI, is inferior in predictive validity in terms of emotional recognition than crystallized intelligence, with fluid intelligence also positively predicting emotional recognition ability. In this study, trait EI did not predict emotion recognition ability, a finding which the authors proposed ‘called into question the validity of the global EI construct.

In terms of trait EI itself, research has found that it heavily overlaps with the big five and HEXACO models of personality derived from factor analyses of the intercorrelations between narrow self-described personality traits. Anglim et al. (2021) found that “trait EI is largely captured by the HEXACO personality framework, whereby extraversion or the GFP provides a rough initial approximation”. Correlations between total EI and HEXACO extraversion were r = .67, and the correlation between total EI and the General Factor of Personality (proposed general factor underlying the big five or other factor based personality models) was between .53-.64.

A more recent study conducted on Indian university students found that big five neuroticism was the largest individual predictor of trait EI, with less neurotic students therefore being more 'emotionally intelligent'. Supporting this finding, Alegre, Pérez-Escoda & López-Cassà (2019) had earlier concluded that total EI lacked discriminate validity vis-à-vis extant personality constructs. They found that trait EI, in particular, correlated strongly negatively with neuroticism and correlated highly positively with the GFP extracted from the big five. This team concluded that their findings “suggest that [the GFP and trait EI] may represent above all just the absence of neuroticism in a person.

Schulte, Ree & Carretta (2004) had earlier concluded EQ strongly correlated with agreeableness and moderately with general intelligence, so it offers very little for predicting human performance over existing psychological concepts.

These findings, taken together, do suggest that overall EI has little predictive validity on its own when IQ and a mixture of big five personality traits are taken into account, and is mostly describing a mixture of social effectiveness promoting individual traits in a different manner. Other researchers seek to subsume the ability facet of emotional intelligence itself under the construct of broader general intelligence, meaning that the cognitive elements of EI are not distinct from IQ but rather a component of it. Some factor analytical studies have supported this notion, finding that broad EI is a distinct subfactor of g, being itself distinct from crystallized intelligence and other subfactors of g such as long-term memory and quantitative intelligence under the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theoretical model of general intelligence.

Nevertheless, some personality researchers argue that EI does predict negative emotional states above and beyond the big five, though to a small degree. This analysis focused on sub-facets of big five neuroticism, with the authors suggesting that these could be better conceptualized as evidence that trait EI mediates the effects of neuroticism on well-being.

See also

• General Factor of Personality
• Social skills
• Personality
• IQ