A Brief Overview of Emotional

The process of creating, refining, and evaluating a measure of a psychological attribute has long been a mainstay of research in the human sciences. Such work can lay the groundwork for further study, both by clarifying the nature and structure of an attribute and by providing a tool for its quantification, which in turn facilitates empirical study of the attribute and its relationship to other variables. Thus valid measurement of a cognitive attribute such as emotional intelligence (EI) is in many ways a prerequisite for deep exploration of the nature and structure of this ability and the ways in which it connects with other cognitive and behavioral phenomena. Through the lens of a modern, argument-based approach to validation, this review examines the accumulated evidence relevant to the argument for the validity of the Mayer–Salovey– Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT Version 2.0; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002) as a measure of the ability of emotional intelligence as articulated by Mayer and Salovey (1997). Although this review finds many aspects of the MSCEIT’s validity argument to be wanting, there is also much that has been learned and can be applied to future research on emotional intelligence and other psychological constructs