Another Kind of Intelligence
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In their article on emotional intelligence and the workplace (included in Mayer's collection on Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life), David Caruso, an intelligence researcher with a specialty in career development and his colleague Charles J. Wolfe provide a good example of how testing for emotional intelligence can be beneficial. Their client, Paul, is a research analyst at a securities firm who hates his job. Caruso and Wolfe use the MEIS (along with other information about job skills and personality traits), obtaining scores for each of the four branches in Mayer and Salovey's model and a total EI score. Here is what they find out about Paul and what they recommend to him: "Paul's MEIS results showed that he was okay at reading people, good at understanding others and managing emotions, but that he was brilliant at using emotions to think creatively. Here was a hidden asset, or ability, that was not being used in his job as an analyst.

"After reviewing these results with Paul, we began to explore alternative career paths. Although he could adequately perform the analyst job, it was too narrow for him. In this case, it was the job, and not the person, that was at the root of the problem. Paul's skills--technical and emotional--could best be put to use in a broader, more creative role such as marketing. ... Five months after our last meeting, Paul called to say that he had taken a job as the director of marketing for a new company. ... Thrilled with the new job, he said that for the first time in his career he was being challenged and was having fun."

This fall, a new version of the MEIS, the MSCEIT (the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test) will be published. "It is, without question, the best test that has been produced so far," Mayer says. "It has been very carefully produced, incorporating research going back 40 years." Mayer imagines that the test will be useful in many different areas, as a training tool for would-be psychotherapists, for example, or as a diagnostic tool in helping children with various emotional blindnesses. "But the test is important only because the concept is accurate," Mayer says. "The important point is the understanding that this intelligence exists."

For Mayer, the interesting thing about emotional intelligence is that it changes our conception of what intelligence is. Just as IQ tests show a continuum of ability to reason abstractly in the cognitive sphere, emotional intelligence explains to us that there is also a continuum based on how adept someone is at abstract reasoning about emotions, and at understanding how emotions play out over time. "Emotional intelligence clarifies cognitive intelligence by saying that this kind of intelligence also exists," says Mayer. "It also constrains it to some extent by saying that cognitive intelligence is not the only brand of intelligence that exists."

Mayer seems very comfortable with the long, strange trip that his theory has taken. "I'm not a natural optimist, but I've believed for a long time that the extraordinarily successful popularization of the concept isn't going to undo it, and that ultimately, it will help it. In the end, I hope that what will be said is that we have discovered a whole new intelligence." ~

Anne Downey '95G is a free-lance writer from Eliot, Maine.

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