Polish Psychological Bulletin

Abstract

Background and purpose of the reportThere are substantial discrepancies in defining the concept of emotional intelligence (EI). Some authors consider EI to consist of several abilities (instrumental dispositions) that determine one's capacity for processing emotional information (the ability model; see Salovey, Mayer, 1990;Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, 2000, 2004, while others also include personality traits, i.e., dispositions representing tendencies (mixed models; see Goleman, 1995;Bar-On, 1997. Petrides and Furnham (2000) proposed a distinction between the ability-based and traitbased models of EI, which mainly refers to mixed models. According to them, the principal difference between these two types of EI is that the former is associated with actual abilities and determines maximal performance (exhibited by humans under particularly motivating conditions), while the latter is linked to "a constellation of behavioral dispositions and self-perceptions concerning one's ability to recognize, process, and utilize emotion-laden information" (Petrides, Furnham, 2001, p. 278), and determines typical performance revealed in everyday situations.Researchers differ not only in their definitions of EI, but also in how they understand its structure. In their model, Mayer and Salovey (1997) proposed four constituent abilities of EI: perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions. The first one means the ability to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts, as well as identify one's own emotions. The second one is defined as harnessing emotions to facilitate various cognitive activities, such as thinking and problem solving. The third one is the ability to comprehend emotion language and appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. Finally, the fourth one consists of regulating and managing emotions both in oneself and in others.The majority of studies on the structure of EI to date (cf.