GUEST EDITORS' NOTE

Abstract

This thematic issue of the journal Psychological Topics is dedicated to emotional intelligence. Twenty-five years after the concept of emotional intelligence was introduced, it still captures the attention of scholars, practitioners, educators, and the public alike. Questions regarding how EI should be defined and measured, with different approaches both to theory and measurement, are still relevant. Emotional intelligence is usually analysed from two different perspectives – the ability models or mixed models. While the ability models focus on an individual's mental abilities to apply information provided by emotions for the improvement of cognitive processing, mixed models conceptualize EI as the combination of mental abilities, stable behavioural traits and personality variables. This volume presents theoretical and empirical papers that address a variety of topics. Two review papers cover new and important themes: the mechanisms of emotional intelligence using a computational approach, and the question on how to transversely develop emotional intelligence through school subjects. Research papers investigate several topics: the relationships between measures of EI and transformational leadership; the effect of the implicit theories of EI and of ability and trait EI on students’ academic achievement; the relationship between perceived emotional intelligence, burnout, work engagement, and job satisfaction in Italian schoolteachers; the developmental changes in EI abilities during early adolescence; and the effects of short-term emotional intelligence training on preschool teachers. Four papers are dedicated to methodological themes: dealing with an ongoing problem of EI measurement, especially its cross-cultural effects: comparing differential item functioning procedure in traditional back translation of the questionnaire with the native translator version; measurement invariance of the Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Emotional Competence Questionnaire across five different countries (Slovenia, Russia, Croatia, India, and the Czech Republic); the psychometric properties of the Vocabulary of Emotions Test (VET) in Serbian context; construction and validation of the Emotional Skills and Competence Questionnaire – Children’s form (ESCQ-C). We hope that this special issue will broaden knowledge in this field and raise further questions about emotional intelligence construct. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the authors who contributed to this thematic issue, and to academic reviewers. We also thank editor-in-chief and editorial board for their support and assistance.