The interaction between emotional intelligence and cognitive ability in predicting scholastic performance in school-aged children

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Abstract

The aim of the present study is to offer an exploration of the predictive validity of cognitive ability and emotional intelligence (EI) on scholastic achievement in a sample of Italian school-aged children (8–11 years). In particular, cognitive ability was measured through Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices, while trait EI was measured through the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire–Child Form (TEIQue-CF). In addition to trait EI, we measured also a basic emotional ability, the emotion recognition ability, through an emotional face recognition task. The results demonstrated an interaction between trait EI and cognitive ability in predicting academic performance. In particular, trait EI was positively associated with better language performance in children characterised by low or medium cognitive ability, but not in pupils characterised by high cognitive ability. Moreover, results showed that trait EI had a unique power to predict math performance. Similarly, the analyses showed an interaction between emotion recognition ability and cognitive ability in predicting both language and math performance. Differences between the two emotional measures were discussed.

Highlights

► We examine the interaction between trait EI and cognitive ability in predicting scholastic success. ► The interaction between emotional recognition ability and cognitive ability was studied. ► Increasing trait EI predicts language performance at low-and mid-levels of cognitive ability. ► Recognition ability predicts language and math performance at low-and mid-levels of cognitive ability. ► Trait EI uniquely predicts math performance irrespective of children’s cognitive level.

Introduction

An analysis of the wide literature dealing with the predictors of academic success indicates that it is generally associated with cognitive intelligence. In particular, past research in this field has primarily focused on cognitive abilities (Colom and Flores-Mendoza, 2007, Farsides and Woodfield, 2003, Neisser et al., 1996) demonstrating the important predictive role of IQ on academic performance (Neisser et al., 1996). Recently, another construct has attracted a lot of interest in this area of research: emotional intelligence (EI; Petrides & Furnham, 2000). EI theoreticians proposed a new perspective in the study of emotions by suggesting that the intelligent use of emotions is essential for one’s physical and psychological adaptation (Extremera & Fernández-Berrocal, 2006). The aim of the present work is to offer an exploration of the predictive validity of different types of intelligence, in particular of trait EI, on scholastic success.

The literature on EI is mainly characterised by the distinction between trait EI (or trait emotional self-efficacy) and ability EI (or cognitive-emotional ability) (Mavroveli et al., 2008, Petrides and Furnham, 2000). Trait EI is conceptualised as a lower-order personality construct and it is defined as a constellation of emotional self-perceptions and behavioural dispositions (Petrides, Pita, & Kokkinaki, 2007). Ability EI is conceived as an actual ability that comprises emotion-related cognitive abilities. While trait EI is measured through self-report questionnaires and is associated with the realm of personality, ability EI is instead measured through maximum-performance tests and is associated to the realm of cognitive ability (Petrides et al., 2004, Petrides, Furnham et al., 2007). According to ability EI theorisation, the emotional abilities are organised along a continuum from those that are relatively lower level (e.g., capacity to perceive emotions accurately), to those that are more developmentally complex (e.g., ability to manage emotions properly) (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2008).

Several studies have explored whether EI may help explain academic achievement (Di Fabio and Palazzeschi, 2009, Laborde et al., 2010, Mavroveli et al., 2009, Mavroveli and Sanchez-Ruiz, 2011, O’Connor and Little, 2003, Parker, Creque et al., 2004, Petrides et al., 2004, Song et al., 2010). On the basis of trait EI definition, it could be expected that trait EI would not correlate strongly with cognitive ability, verbal intelligence, or academic achievement. Indeed, as previously mentioned, trait EI is considered a personality trait rather than a cognitive ability. That said, it would not be expected to be highly associated either with psychometric intelligence or proxies thereof (Petrides et al., 2004). Nevertheless, although emotion-related self-perceptions would not be expected to be directly associated with better or poorer scholastic achievement, it is possible that they may interact with variables that are (e.g., cognitive abilities). The results of several studies by Mavroveli et al., 2008, Mavroveli et al., 2009, and Petrides et al. (2004) confirmed these assumptions.

A moderating effect of trait EI on the relation between IQ and academic performance was demonstrated, so that high trait EI was associated with better English (but not math or science) performance in low-IQ high school students (Petrides et al., 2004). However, a direct but modest correlation between trait EI and academic performance in high school and university students has also been reported (Parker, Creque et al., 2004, Parker, Summerfeldt et al., 2004). Similarly, Mavroveli and Sanchez-Ruiz (2011) recently showed a significant relationship between trait EI and math scores in children aged 3 years but not in older pupils (4–6 years). The different findings that emerged from these studies suggested that the effects of trait EI may vary across educational levels, age, and subjects.

Other studies explored the relation between ability EI and academic achievement with mixed results. In one study with university students, ability EI predicted academic performance over and above general mental abilities (Song et al., 2010). However, another study with 18- to 32-year-old students showed that emotional understanding ability, but not overall ability EI, was associated with academic performance (O’Connor & Little, 2003). The emerging findings revealed again an inconsistent pattern, probably depending both on how scholastic performance is operationalised in the different studies and on the characteristics of the sample (e.g., gender, age).

To date, the research on the relationship between EI and academic achievement has been mainly based on samples of college students and adolescents. In contrast, there is little evidence from child samples, partly because of a lack of appropriate measures. Moreover, the results on children are not always fully consistent (for a review, see Mavroveli & Sanchez-Ruiz, 2011). The current study aims to fill this gap by analysing the effects of cognitive ability (operationalised through Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices) and EI in predicting scholastic achievement in a sample of school-aged children. Moreover, since the simultaneous contribution of both trait EI and ability EI in explaining scholastic success has been rarely explored (O’Connor & Little, 2003) and, as far as we know, it has never been investigated in primary school students, we tested the effect of EI components on children’s scholastic achievement by considering both self-report and performance measures. Instead of seeing the two types of EI as contrasting constructs, we considered them as different ways of approaching the study of EI, which could bring different and incremental contributions in explaining scholastic achievement. In particular, taking into account the developmental trajectory followed by emotional abilities, we explored only the effect of the lower-level and fundamental skill—that is, emotional perception (specifically, the ability to accurately perceive emotions in the face). The most-used ability EI measurement methods (e.g., the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test [MSCEIT]) consider emotional facial expression recognition as a central task to measure emotional perception ability; for this reason, in the present study we measured emotional perception ability through an emotional face recognition task. The choice of using only the recognition task among the eight tasks provided by MSCEIT to assess EI abilities is also due to the lack of published methodologies to measure ability EI in young children1. Furthermore, emotion recognition, on the basis of a long research tradition in developmental literature (Camras and Allison, 1985, Herba et al., 2006), is, at present, the only EI ability that can be tested with a reliable task in children (i.e., the recognition of emotions from prototypical emotional facial expressions). In addition to this basic ability, we measured trait EI through TEIQue-CF (Mavroveli et al., 2008). We hypothesised that the two measures would separately predict academic achievement, interacting with cognitive abilities in predicting children’s performance across different subjects (i.e., mathematics and language). According to Petrides et al. (2004), the effect of trait EI on academic performance should be stronger when the demands of the situation outweigh students’ intellectual resources. On the basis of this assumption, we hypothesised that the effects of trait EI on scholastic performance should be more pronounced in children with low levels of cognitive ability. We hypothesised that the same trend should emerge in emotion recognition ability; this ability represents a basic emotional competence, and its impact should emerge as soon as the situation requires more than intellectual resources.

Section snippets

Participants

Four hundred and forty-seven children ranging in age from 8 to 11 years participated in the study. All participants were recruited from primary (third- to fifth-grade) state schools in the districts of Bologna. Pupils with special educational needs (n = 12) were excluded from subsequent analyses; complete data were available for 352 pupils (188 females) ranging in age from 8 to 11 years old (mean age = 9.35 years; SD = 0.8 years). Children with missing data were excluded from the analyses.

Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire–Child Form (Mavroveli et al., 2008)

The TEIQue-CF

Results

Means and standard deviations and correlations between all the study variables are presented in Table 1. A positive correlation between language and math performance emerged, and both of them were positively related to cognitive ability, emotion recognition ability, and trait EI. No relation between trait EI and recognition ability emerged.

Discussion

The main purpose of the present study was to determine the predictive validity of trait EI on scholastic achievement in a sample of school-aged children. In addition to trait EI, we explored the impact of a basic emotional ability, the emotion recognition ability, on scholastic success. As hypothesised, both trait EI and emotion recognition ability uniquely predicted academic performance and interacted with cognitive ability in explaining academic performance.

In agreement with Petrides’s

Acknowledgement

We wish to thank K.V. Petrides for his helpful comments on previous versions of the draft.

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