Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Test

By Murat Şahin · Updated November 12, 2026 · How we test

How this EQ test works

Press Start the EQ test and you see one statement at a time, such as "I can usually tell how someone feels from their face or tone of voice." Pick how well it describes how you usually feel and act, from Disagree to Agree. Keys 1 to 5 work too, and Back lets you change an earlier answer. There are 24 statements and most people finish in about four minutes.

The statements cover the four domains of emotional intelligence, six each: knowing your own feelings, handling them, reading other people and managing relationships. Some are worded the other way ("Other people's feelings are often a mystery to me") and are reversed before scoring, so you cannot raise every score by agreeing with everything. Emotional intelligence overlaps with broad personality traits such as agreeableness and emotional stability, which the Big Five personality test measures directly.

The four domains

The four-part structure follows the model Richard Boyatzis, Daniel Goleman and Kenneth Rhee (2000) described after analysing their Emotional Competence Inventory:

• Self-awareness: recognising and naming what you feel and noticing how it affects you.
• Self-management: keeping strong feelings from taking over, staying steady under pressure, bouncing back.
• Social awareness: reading other people's emotions and taking their point of view.
• Relationship management: calming tension, saying hard things kindly and repairing after conflict.

The term emotional intelligence itself comes from Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1990), who defined it as the ability to monitor your own and others' feelings and use that information to guide thinking and action. Goleman's 1995 book made "EQ" a household word.

How to read your score

Each domain has a raw score between 6 and 30, which we convert to 0–100 with (raw − 6) ÷ 24 × 100. Your overall score is the average of the four. Under each bar you get a short description that changes at fixed points we chose for readability: below 35 reads as the low end, 35 to 65 as the middle, above 65 as the high end.

Two cautions. First, this score is not a percentile: a 70 does not mean you scored higher than 70% of people, because the items are original and there is no norm group. Second, it is not an EQ score in the way an IQ score is. There is no standard "EQ of 100". The number only shows where your answers fall on this questionnaire.

The most useful part is usually the gap between domains. Many people rate themselves well on reading others and lower on handling their own reactions, or the other way round, and that is where practice pays off.

Self-report is not the same as ability

There are two very different ways to measure emotional intelligence. Self-report questionnaires like this one ask how you see yourself; researchers such as K. V. Petrides and Adrian Furnham (2001) call this trait emotional intelligence and treat it as part of personality. Ability tests such as the MSCEIT (Mayer, Salovey, Caruso & Sitarenios, 2003) give you tasks with better and worse answers, such as identifying the emotions in faces or choosing how to handle a situation.

The two do not agree as much as you might expect. Marc Brackett and colleagues (2006) found that self-rated emotional intelligence and performance on an ability test were only weakly related. In other words, believing you read people well and actually reading them well are different things. This page measures the first one, honestly labelled.

How to improve

• Name it. A few times a day, put a precise word to what you feel: irritated, disappointed, anxious, relieved.
• Pause before replying. A short delay is the simplest self-management tool.
• Ask, don't guess. "How did that land?" gives you social information directly.
• Repair early. Make the first move after an argument while it is still small.

How you handle closeness also shapes these skills; the attachment style test looks at that side. If you are thinking about what kind of work suits you, the career test turns your interests into a Holland code.

Limits of this test

The 24 statements were written for this site. The IPIP does contain emotional-intelligence-related scales (Barchard, 2001), but they measure seven different facets that do not map onto the four domains here, so we did not use them. The items are original and unnormed, answers depend on mood and self-image, and the result should not be used for hiring or clinical decisions. This is a self-reflection tool, not a psychological assessment.

More tests like this: personality tests.

Sources

• Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. Bantam Books.
• Boyatzis, R. E., Goleman, D., & Rhee, K. S. (2000). Clustering competence in emotional intelligence: Insights from the Emotional Competence Inventory. In R. Bar-On & J. D. A. Parker (Eds.), The handbook of emotional intelligence (pp. 343–362). Jossey-Bass.
• Petrides, K. V., & Furnham, A. (2001). Trait emotional intelligence: Psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies. European Journal of Personality, 15(6), 425–448.
• Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D. R., & Sitarenios, G. (2003). Measuring emotional intelligence with the MSCEIT V2.0. Emotion, 3(1), 97–105.
• Brackett, M. A., Rivers, S. E., Shiffman, S., Lerner, N., & Salovey, P. (2006). Relating emotional abilities to social functioning: A comparison of self-report and performance measures of emotional intelligence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(4), 780–795.
• Barchard, K. A. (2001). Emotional and social intelligence: Examining its place in the nomological network (Doctoral dissertation). University of British Columbia. Items: International Personality Item Pool, ipip.ori.org.

Frequently asked questions