A self-report EQ score tells you how you describe your own emotional style: how openly you show feelings, how much you attend to them, and how much other people’s emotions move you. It cannot tell you how skilled you are with emotions, and it predicts how you will do at work far less than the popular claims suggest.
What the research finds
EQ is the popular name; researchers say emotional intelligence, and they divide it into ability measures, with right answers, and self-report measures, which this site uses. Joseph and Newman (2010) pooled the studies relating both kinds to job performance. Ability measures predicted performance only in jobs with high emotional labour, such as customer-facing work, and their model showed the abilities working as a chain: perceiving emotion feeds understanding it, which feeds managing it, which feeds performance.
Self-report measures predicted performance more broadly, but Joseph and others (2015) asked why. Across the studies they pooled, self-reported emotional intelligence correlated about .3 with job performance, and most of that was explained by things the questionnaires also measure: conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, general mental ability and self-rated performance. Once those were accounted for, the extra contribution of the EQ score was close to nothing. A self-report EQ measure is largely a repackaging of personality.
Mayer, Roberts and Barsade (2008) reached a similar view from the ability side: ability scores relate modestly to verbal intelligence and to social outcomes, and self-report scores relate strongly to the Big Five, so the two should not be treated as the same thing.
What a score does not mean
It does not mean you are good or bad at handling emotions. The site’s scales ask what you do and feel, not how well; high responsive distress means you carry other people’s pain, and high negative expressivity means everyone knows when you are angry. Each end of each scale has costs.
It is not a single number. The site’s test, built from Barchard’s analysis, found seven distinct components that do not add up to one thing, so there is no total and no overall EQ. It is not a comparison with other people, because no norm sample is published and the site does not invent one. It is not a diagnosis of anything.
What it means for your results
Read the seven strips separately, since a high score on one says nothing about the others. Each strip is drawn against the possible range for that component, with the marker at your raw score. The scales’ reliabilities range from .59 to .83 in the published samples, so a marker a point or two from where you expected is within the noise; a marker at the far end of a strip describes a style you will probably recognise.
The emotional intelligence test takes seven minutes, is scored on your device and shows all seven components on strips, with a description of what each end of each one looks like in daily life.