Emotional Intelligence: Implications for Human Factors

Abstract

This paper reviews the relevance to the human factors practitioner of emotional intelligence (EI), the ability to understand and manage emotion. Assessment of EI may be useful for predicting individual differences in performance in stressful operational environments. However, existing research demonstrates some difficulties in developing valid tests for EI. Self-report and objective tests for EI fail to converge well, and may be measuring different constructs. Objective tests are promising, but further research is needed to establish their predictive validity in human factors contexts. Three examples are given of applied contexts in which assessment of EI may be valuable: performance under stress, coping with anger and frustration and teamwork. Tests for EI might be used either for operator selection, or as an adjunct to training, but further research is needed to validate their use. The paper concludes with some initial guidelines for deciding whether EI is potentially relevant to a particular operational setting.