Full IQ Test
Free tool · Emotional intelligence

Free EQ test

Twenty statements about how you handle feelings — yours and other people’s. We’ll give you an EQ estimate and a five-competency profile, with your strongest domain, your growth edge, and the honest version of what a test like this can and can’t tell you.

  • 20 questions · an EQ estimate + a 5-axis profile
  • Your strongest competency — and the one to work on, with a concrete move
  • What EQ tests actually measure (and what they don’t)
20 questions · ~2 minutes · no signup

What emotional intelligence actually is

The term comes from a 1990 paper by Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who defined emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive, use, understand and manage emotions — a real kind of intelligence operating on emotional information, the way IQ operates on verbal, numerical and spatial information. In their four-branch model: perceiving emotions (in faces, voices, yourself), using emotions to help thinking and motivation, understanding emotions (how they blend, escalate, change), and managing emotions (regulating your own, influencing others’).

The version most people have heard of is Daniel Goleman’s, from his 1995 bestseller. He reframed EQ as five competencies — self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, social skill — which is the framework this test uses, because it’s the one that maps cleanly onto everyday life. Worth knowing, though: Goleman’s is a “mixed model”. It folds in personality traits and motivational variables, so it’s broader and fuzzier than the narrow ability construct Salovey and Mayer described — a distinction that matters when people start making big claims about it.

How EQ is measured — and why this test is a self-report

There are two families of EQ measures, and they behave quite differently:

  • Ability tests — the MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso) is the main one. It has actual right and wrong answers, scored against expert or consensus norms (“which emotion is in this face?”, “what blend produces contempt?”). This is the rigorous kind, and it’s the one researchers mean when they talk about EQ as an intelligence.
  • Self-report questionnaires — the EQ-i (Bar-On), the TEIQue (Petrides, “trait EI”), the SSEIT, and quizzes like this one. You rate statements about yourself. They’re quick and easy — and they measure your self-image of your emotional skills, which is not the same thing. The well-replicated finding: self-report EQ correlates more strongly with personality — especially emotional stability and extraversion — than with the ability tests. People who feel emotionally competent rate themselves emotionally competent.

So treat your result here as a useful self-portrait, not a measurement. The genuinely informative part isn’t the headline number — it’s the shape of your five-axis profile, and especially the gap between your strongest competency and your weakest. That gap is where the cheapest growth is.

The Goleman over-claim — keeping EQ in proportion

Goleman’s book is the reason “EQ” is a household phrase, and it’s also where the popular story diverges most from the evidence. The headline claim — that EQ predicts success better than IQ, perhaps twice as much — is not supported by peer-reviewed research. The book attributed the predictive power of a broad bundle (motivation, persistence, social skill, optimism) to “EQ” while implying it was the same thing as the narrow Mayer-Salovey construct. Mayer himself has been blunt about this: the popular conception is “diluted”, and the “EQ beats IQ” line is an “exaggeration of what we have actually shown”. The honest summary: rigorously measured EQ has real but modest incremental predictive value — strongest in emotionally demanding work (sales, teaching, healthcare, leadership; Joseph & Newman, 2010) — and it does not trump IQ, which remains the single strongest predictor of job performance across roles (Schmidt & Hunter, 2004). The two measure different things and are most useful together. For the full comparison, see IQ vs EQ.

Can you raise your EQ?

More readily than fluid IQ, yes. Emotion-recognition accuracy, self-regulation strategies, and the social skills that overlap EQ all respond to deliberate practice, and structured social-emotional training reliably improves performance-based measures — the behavioural ceiling looks higher than for fluid-IQ training, partly because EQ tasks are closer to skills than to capacities. But it isn’t pure environment either: twin studies put the heritability of ability-based EQ at roughly h² = 0.4 (Vernon et al., 2008) — smaller than IQ’s, well above zero. So: real room to grow, a real floor and ceiling, and the obvious place to start is your lowest competency below.

The five competencies (and how to strengthen each)

  • Self-awareness — reading your own emotions accurately, knowing your triggers. The foundation; you can’t manage what you can’t see. Strengthen it with brief, frequent check-ins: “what am I feeling, and why?”
  • Self-regulation — managing impulses, recovering from upsets, not getting hijacked. Strengthen it by building a pause: name the feeling, then do anything else for 60–90 seconds before responding. The wave crests.
  • Empathy — reading others’ emotions, taking their perspective even when you disagree. Strengthen it by asking more and assuming less, and by the question “what would have to be true for that reaction to make sense?”
  • Social skill — handling relationships, defusing tension, building rapport, dealing with conflict. EQ that stays inside you isn’t worth much. Strengthen it with a small ready repertoire (“that sounds really hard” lands fine almost every time) and by naming conflict small and early.
  • Drive & optimism — emotions pointed at a goal: persistence through setbacks, intrinsic motivation, expecting things to work out. Strengthen it by borrowing structure on purpose (commitments, deadlines, accountability) rather than waiting to “feel motivated” — motivation tends to follow action, not precede it.
Take the full IQ test

EQ is one half of how a mind works. The IQ test measures the other — reasoning across five cognitive domains, on the standard scale.

References

  • Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.
  • Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D. R., & Cherkasskiy, L. (2011). Emotional intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg & S. B. Kaufman (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence (pp. 528–549). Cambridge University Press.
  • Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
  • Bar-On, R. (2006). The Bar-On model of emotional-social intelligence (ESI). Psicothema, 18(Suppl.), 13–25.
  • Petrides, K. V., & Furnham, A. (2001). Trait emotional intelligence: Psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies. European Journal of Personality, 15(6), 425–448.
  • Joseph, D. L., & Newman, D. A. (2010). Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 54–78.
  • Vernon, P. A., Petrides, K. V., Bratko, D., & Schermer, J. A. (2008). A behavioral genetic study of trait emotional intelligence. Emotion, 8(5), 635–642.
  • Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (2004). General mental ability in the world of work. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(1), 162–173.