Emotional Intelligence: Current Research and Future Perspectives on Mental Health and Individual Differences

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Background

Emotional intelligence (EI) is arguably the most popular of the novel intelligence. As a term, EI was coined at some point in the 1960s, but it only became popular due to the bestselling book by Daniel Goleman, attracting an increasing amount of interest from both academia and practitioners. EI is now recognized by the scientific community as a relevant psychological factor for several important real-life domains, including mental health and wellbeing. A side effect of this boom in research activity was a flood of models and tests, consequently, the label ‘EI’ has been indicating a wide array of models and measures, sometimes conflicting, which may be an obstacle to a consistent summary of empirical evidence. This confusion is problematic because different measurement approaches produce different results, which made it impossible to say what EI really is or what it predicts since there was no consistency in the empirical data.

Existing literature suggests that individual differences in EI consistently predict human behavior across the life span and that EI levels can benefit from specific training. However, to further improve our knowledge on EI with solid empirical evidence, we need to address some of the main open issues related to this important psychological dimension, particularly:
1) the existence of many conflicting models and related measures of EI, often having a weak psychometric basis. Some EI measures were based on attempts to develop items mimicking IQ-tests, other EI measures were based on self-report questions, and yet others on makeshift tasks that looked pretty and engaging, but were scientifically baseless;
2) the relation between EI with other partially overlapping constructs, such as emotional competence, emotional awareness, and emotion regulation;
3) the relation between EI and clinical outcomes, including the onset and maintenance of medical and psychological conditions;
4) the lack of data on those individuals who could be the most benefit from EI training, such as children, adolescents, and their parents.

The main goal of this Research Topic is to help the field’s advancement in both theory and practice. Specifically, this Research Topic aims to provide new data which may help to critically review EI’s theory by checking the adequacy of different measurements and applications, for both ability and trait models. This may ultimately aid the scientific community in both discriminating between conceptualizations and guiding toward the most accurate.

This Frontiers Research Topic is focused on EI (trait and ability EI) across the lifespan. We welcome contributions on the role played by EI in different domains, including psychometrics, mental health, social relations, education, as well as studies on the evaluation of EI training, the neuro-biological origin of EI, and theoretical integration of EI with other relevant constructs. The objective of this Research Topic is to present the latest advances in the field of EI, through updates, critical discussions on theory, analysis of the reliability and validity of assessment tools, and review of the implications for applied settings. We accept scientific articles and meta-analyses from scholars, practitioners, and clinicians in the area, as well as guidelines for research evidence-based interventions. Our coverage includes evaluation of EI lifelong (in children, adolescents, as well as in the adult and aging population), declined in any context (clinical and medical, educational and academic, organizational, and community).

Keywords: Emotional Intelligence, Mental health, Individual differences, Social relations, Clinical settings, EI training, EI measurement, EI theory

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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