Date of Graduation

Fall 2015

Degree

Master of Science in Psychology

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Donald Fischer

Abstract

Emotional intelligence (EI) has attracted much attention in the decades since Goleman's (1995) claim that EI is important for success in a wide range of social and professional roles. With this interest has come much debate about whether EI should be defined and measured as a set of abilities or as a set of dispositional self-perceptions. The latter is typically assessed with self-report measures that are susceptible to contamination related to inaccurate self-knowledge and impression management artifacts – problems that may be mitigated by implicit measures. This research used Implicit Association Test (IAT) procedures to develop implicit measures of EI and investigated relationships with theoretically related explicit (self-report) measures. The results of confirmatory factor analyses of nested latent trait models provided some evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. However, internal consistency reliability estimates indicated that some of the IATs are contaminated with excessive measurement error. Problems with these basic psychometric properties suggest directions for future work in order to realize the full potential of these measures.

Keywords

emotional intelligence, implicit measures, Implicit Association Test, construct validity, confirmatory factor analysis, nested latent trait models

Subject Categories

Psychology

Copyright

© Louis Leo Oberdiear

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