What Is a Good EQ Score?

Emotional-intelligence assessments use different models and scoring systems. A number only makes sense with that instrument's scoring rules and supporting evidence. This site's knowledge quiz does not measure your personal emotional abilities; use it to practise the concepts.

What the four components are

The dominant models differ in detail and agree on the broad structure. Four abilities keep appearing.

Self-awareness is accurate identification of your own emotional state, including states that are inconvenient to admit. It is the foundation for the rest, since regulating a feeling you have misidentified as something else rarely works.

Self-regulation is the gap between the feeling and the response. Impulse control, recovery after a setback, and the ability to stay useful while upset.

Social awareness is reading other people accurately: what they feel, what they are likely to do, and what the room is doing. This is the component most people mean when they say someone has high EQ.

Relationship management is acting on the other three. Handling conflict, giving difficult feedback, and repairing after a rupture.

Correct and incorrect answers indicate knowledge of the concepts in this practice. They do not establish a trait profile, diagnosis or job fit.

Practising emotional-skills concepts

The existing timed assessments use a limited question bank and a site-defined scoring curve. Their IQ-style numbers and percentile displays are illustrative estimates, not norms established from a representative validation study. We have not established clinical validity for these assessments.

For example, staying calm and understanding another person are different skills. A hypothetical example can illustrate the distinction; this quiz cannot determine your personal skill profile.

Try naming an emotion, pausing before responding and asking what another person needs. Use real situations and feedback to reflect on these habits rather than inferring them from a quiz total.

Ability tests and self-report tests measure different things

This is an illustrative score from this assessment, not a clinically validated IQ result.

Self-report has an obvious problem: it measures your beliefs about your emotional intelligence, and the people with the least of it are the least equipped to rate themselves accurately. Correlations between self-report and ability measures of EQ are modest.

Choosing a sensible answer in a written scenario is different from acting under pressure. Neither a knowledge quiz nor a single total establishes how you behave in everyday relationships.

How much EQ actually predicts

The popular claim that EQ predicts success far better than IQ is not supported. It traces to a trade book rather than to research, and the studies behind it do not carry it.

What holds up is narrower and still useful. Emotional intelligence predicts job performance modestly overall and more strongly in roles built on emotional labor, such as sales, care work, teaching, and management. It adds predictive value over and above cognitive ability and personality, which is the real finding, though the increment is smaller than the popular version suggests.

Use practice to work on specific habits, such as listening and pausing before a response. Do not treat a change in this quiz score as evidence that your emotional abilities have changed.

Questions people also ask

Keep reading

• The Big Five Personality Traits ExplainedWhat each of the five traits predicts, and why it beat the MBTI.
• The Four Attachment Styles ExplainedWhere the four styles come from and how they show up.
• Signs of High Intelligence (And the Myths)What the research supports, and the popular signs that fail.

Continue learning

Try a free explained practice session and a seven-day plan. No purchase is required.

Start free practice Explore optional resources