Studying the Emotional Intelligence/Creativity Link
In a recent study conducted by me and two of my awesome graduate students, Olivia Jewell and Kian Betancourt, we sought to examine the relationship between a facet of emotional intelligence (we call it “empathic accuracy”) and creativity. Past research on the relationship between emotional intelligence and creativity has been mixed.
That said, we proposed that the ability to accurately estimate the emotions of another would be related to ratings of one’s creative writing. Why? Our reasoning is essentially this: People who are rated as highly creative are rated as such by other people—thus, there is an inherent social aspect to creativity. Past scholars in the field of evolutionary psychology, in fact, have argued that human creativity largely evolved for social purposes—to demonstrate dispositional features of oneself to others in domains such as mating (see Geher & Miller, 2008). As such, the ability to hone in on others’ emotions should correspond to an increase in the quality of one’s creative products.
