Reimagining Emotional Intelligence: A Healthy,Much Needed,and Important Progression for the Field

Fontaine (2016) provides a reconceptualization of emotional intelligence (EI) according to a componential emotion approach. Such a commentary is exactly what we were hoping for in our proposal to unite emotion theory with EI. Fontaine’s model appears generalizable across cultures, subgroups, and specific contexts. Moreover, the model is eminently testable: Instruments can be developed to assess the identification, understanding, and management of “action tendencies, bodily reactions, expressions, and how these relate to situational antecedents, appraisals, and feelings” (p. 333). If these instruments are developed, and show convincing validity evidence, our article would have served its intended purpose as a catalyst for theory development. Fontaine’s proposal represents an important direction for the field, which has come to accept the originally revolutionary 1997 Mayer–Salovey EI model as dogma.

Hughes and Evans (2016) suggest that personality traits (such as trait EI) interact with EI to predict emotion regulation. Fontaine’s (2016) footnote succinctly summarizes this premise: Both EI and “also other traits, such as personality, can affect actual [emotion] regulation” (p. 333). However, we find the term trait EI problematic. Both theory and empirical evidence show that trait EI instruments assess personality rather than intelligence (Roberts, Schulze, & MacCann, 2008), such that the term emotional intelligence can be misleading. Our contention is that traits such as optimism and empathy might be better integrated as facets of existing personality models rather than studied as separate phenomena.

In this vein, future research might thus explore which elements of known personality models (e.g., the underlying facets of the Big Five, HEXACO, or the Dark Triad) are involved in emotion regulation, and how these interact with EI. Enacting any regulation strategies logically requires both knowing what to do (EI) and the will or tendency to actually do it (personality). As such, emotion knowledge and emotional tendencies should be studied in tandem.