Review
A comprehensive meta-analysis of the relationship between Emotional Intelligence and health

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Abstract

In everyday life, people have the notion that acknowledging and dealing effectively with emotions contributes to their wellbeing. A recent meta-analysis by Schutte, Malouff, Thorsteinsson, Bhullar, and Rooke (2007) indicated that Emotional Intelligence (EI) is associated with better health. Our purpose is to expand their work by including: (1) studies published after the date considered by them; (2) non-English studies; and (3) a cumulative meta-analysis to check for the sufficiency and stability in the history of this research domain. Based on 105 effect sizes and 19,815 participants, the results globally support previous findings. When measured as a trait, EI was more strongly associated with health (r¯ = .34) than when it was measured as an ability (r¯ = .17). The weighted average association with mental (r¯ = .36) and psychosomatic health (r¯ = .33) was higher, than the association with physical health (r¯ = .27). Within the trait approach, the TEIQue showed the strongest association with mental health (r¯ = .50), followed by the EQ-i (r¯ = .44), SEIS (r¯ = .29) and TMMS (r¯ = .24). Furthermore, the cumulative meta-analysis indicated that this line of research has already reached sufficiency and stability. Overall, the results are encouraging regarding the value of EI as a plausible health predictor.

Introduction

In everyday life, people have the notion that acknowledging and dealing effectively with emotions contributes to their wellbeing. On the other hand, ignoring them or not dealing with them properly can deteriorate their welfare, especially if it happens on a regular basis. For example, the perspective of an exam or an interview can make us feel anxious and if we are not able to find ways to deal with these emotions, we might end up feeling truly ill.

Being able to recognize what we and other people feel, and finding ways to deal with those emotions is an important facet of what psychologists generally call Emotional Intelligence (EI). After almost 20 years of research in the field of EI, doubts still exist about its conceptualization and relevance in different life domains. Considered either as a set of interrelated abilities (e.g., Mayer & Salovey, 1997) or as a constellation of emotional self-perceptions within the lower levels of personality hierarchies (Petrides, Pita & Kokkinaki, 2007), EI has received divergent operationalisations, either as a test of maximum performance (e.g., MSCEIT – Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test) or as a self-report questionnaire (e.g., TEIQue – Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire), respectively. The lack of consensus endorsed the proliferation of many different instruments to measure this new construct, making it difficult to take confident conclusions about EI’s real value and impact. One valuable way to put together disperse results from different studies is using meta-analysis, a rigorous quantitative approach which refers to the statistical integration of the results of independent studies, leading to conclusions that are more precise and more reliable than can be derived in any one primary study or in a narrative review (Johnson et al., 1995, Rosenthal and DiMatteo, 2001).

Three important efforts have been made in this direction in EI’s domain. Van Rooy and Viswesvaran (2004) used this approach to analyze EI’s construct validity and Van Rooy, Viswesvaran, and Pluta (2005) meta-analyzed its predictive validity concerning performance. More recently, Schutte et al. (2007) also used this approach to examine the relationship between EI and health, an area that had not received specific attention in the previous meta-analytic studies. Their undertaking showed that higher EI is linked with better health. However, since then, more studies have been published that would be includable in the analysis of this relationship, as well as non-English studies (e.g., Spanish), available both before and after their work. This has the advantage of increasing the sample size and, therefore, the statistical power of the meta-analysis, besides doing justice to those studies (Johnson, Scott-Sheldon, Snyder, Noar, & Huedo-Medina, 2008). Furthermore, to our knowledge, a cumulative meta-analysis has not yet been performed in this area. Mullen, Muellerleile, and Bryant (2001) defined cumulative meta-analysis as “the procedure of performing a (new) meta-analysis at every point during the history of a research domain” (pp. 1451). This procedure addresses the questions of sufficiency and stability in a specific area. The first one indicates whether a certain phenomenon is already established or needs additional studies and the second one indicates whether new studies would change the existing findings. This would give researchers the notion that more investigation is required in order to test the relationship between EI and health.

In summary, the purpose of this paper is to expand the findings of Schutte et al.’s (2007) work in three ways: (1) by including studies published after their meta-analysis; (2) by including non-English studies that became available both before and after their meta-analysis; and (3) by performing a cumulative meta-analysis.

Section snippets

Method

Since there are two distinct methods to measure EI (ability-based vs. personality-like trait) and so many different instruments, especially in the last case, it is important to investigate their relative value as a health predictor. Therefore, two separate meta-analyses were conducted: one considering the two distinct methods as different tasks (ability vs. trait) and another considering the specific instrument used as different tasks (e.g., EQ-i).

In order to compare the results with those

Results

Hypothesis tests for the ability and trait tasks were separately subjected to the following meta-analytic procedures: combination of significance levels, and the combination and diffuse comparison of effect sizes (for more details please refer to Rosenthal & Rubin, 1986). The same was done for the diverse trait tasks, that were used more often: TMMS

Discussion

The first meta-analytic studies in the EI domain were mainly concerned with construct (e.g., Van Rooy et al., 2005) and predictive validity, particularly its relationship with performance (e.g., Van Rooy & Viswesvaran, 2004). Subsequently, Schutte et al. (2007) decided to take a more in-depth look at the association between EI and health and systematically reviewed studies investigating this relationship. However, due to the widespread interest in this area, numerous additional studies became

Conclusion

The main findings of the present meta-analysis represent an extension of the results obtained by Schutte et al. (2007) and corroborate the overall tendencies already identified by their study, reinforcing prior conclusions. First, as they already pointed out, the effect sizes for the relationship between EI and the three types of health found in the present research compare favorably to the association of .20 between EI and work performance reported by Van Rooy and Viswesvaran (2004). Schutte

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the Ph.D scholarship granted by the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology – to the first author. The authors wish to express their gratitude for Prof. Tirza Leader (University of Kent) helpful comments and suggestions on a previous version of this paper, as well as for making available her software program that supported the analysis of the results presented in this study.

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    This paper is based on a presentation held at the II Emotional Intelligence International Congress in September 16th 2009 at Santander (Spain).

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