Emotional intelligence and the eye of the beholder: Comparing self- and parent-rated situational judgments in adolescents

A situational judgment test of emotion management was administered to 382 eighth-grade students with typical-performance instructions (i.e., “What would you do in this situation?”). The emotion management test was also administered to a parent of each student in an observer-judgment format (i.e., “What would your child do in this situation?”). Compared to self-evaluations, parent-evaluations showed: (a) lower means, (b) higher correlations with Extraversion and lower correlations with Agreeableness, (c) lower correlations with intelligence, and (d) about equal prediction of criteria. In combination with a relatively low correlation between self- and parent-evaluations (r = .19), results suggest that self- and other-judgments may measure substantively different constructs.