Emotional Intelligence (EI) has been conceptualized in the literature either as a
dispositional tendency, in line with a personality trait (trait EI; Petrides and Furnham,
2001), or as an ability, moderately correlated with general intelligence (ability EI;
Mayer and Salovey, 1997). Surprisingly, there have been few empirical attempts
conceptualizing how the different EI approaches should be related to each other.
However, understanding how the different approaches of EI may be interwoven and/or
complementary is of primary importance for clarifying the conceptualization of EI and
organizing the literature around it. We introduce a theoretical framework explaining how
trait EI, ability EI, and emotion information processing – a novel component related
to EI recently introduced in the literature (e.g., Fiori and Vesely Maillefer, 2018) –
may contribute to effective emotion-related performance and provide initial evidence
supporting its usefulness in predicting EI-related outcomes. More specifically, we show
that performance in a task in which participants had to infer the mental and emotional
states of others, namely a Theory of Mind task, was predicted jointly (e.g., interaction
effects) by trait EI, ability EI, and emotion information processing, after controlling for
personality and IQ (N = 323). Our results argue for the importance of investigating the
joint contribution of different aspects of EI in explaining variability in emotionally laden
outcomes.