Trait emotional intelligence is how you describe your own emotional style, measured by asking you; ability emotional intelligence is how well you actually perceive, understand and reason about emotions, measured with tasks that have right answers. The two names cover different things, and scores on one say little about scores on the other.
Two traditions
The ability view comes from Mayer and Salovey, who treat emotional intelligence as a set of mental abilities like any other: perceiving emotion in faces and voices, using emotion to help thinking, understanding how emotions combine and change, and managing them. These are tested the way vocabulary or reasoning are tested, with items that can be got right or wrong. Mayer, Roberts and Barsade (2008) reviewed that work and found ability scores correlate modestly with verbal intelligence and only weakly with the Big Five, which is what a distinct ability should do.
The trait view, from Petrides and colleagues, treats emotional intelligence as a collection of self-perceptions: how emotionally aware, expressive and self-controlled people say they are. It is measured by questionnaire. Petrides, Pita and Kokkinaki (2007) showed that trait emotional intelligence sits inside personality space as a distinct factor at the lower levels of the Big Five hierarchy, related to all five traits but not identical with any of them.
How far apart they are
Brackett and Mayer (2003) gave the same people an ability test and two self-report measures. The ability test and the self-reports correlated weakly, around .2, while the self-reports correlated strongly with the Big Five. People are not good judges of their own emotional ability, in the same way that people’s ratings of their own intelligence track their measured intelligence only loosely.
What a trait score does not mean
A high score on a self-report does not mean you read faces or defuse arguments better than other people; that is an ability question, and no questionnaire can answer it. A low score does not mean you lack skill with emotions; it means you describe yourself as less expressive, less attentive to feelings or less moved by others. A score of either kind is not a diagnosis of anything.
What it means for your results
The test on this site is a trait measure: 68 items in seven components from the IPIP, built from Barchard’s analysis of the self-report literature. The items are statements such as Express my affection physically and Listen to my feelings when making important decisions, and the components cover how openly you show happiness, whether you hide anger, whether you analyse your feelings, whether you decide by heart or head, and how much other people’s joy, suffering and troubles move you. They are a portrait of your emotional style as you see it. They do not measure emotional ability, which needs performance tasks.
The emotional intelligence test takes seven minutes, is scored on your device and shows each of the seven components on its own strip.