The Link between Emotional Intelligence and Creativity

Empathic accuracy, or the ability to accurately know the emotional states of others, is a basic aspect of emotional intelligence. The current study explored the relationship between a standard measure of emotion-detection ability, the reading the mind in the eyes test, along with spontaneous measures of creativity (as well as the Big Five personality traits). To measure spontaneous creativity, participants were asked to come up with brief captions for two New Yorker cartoons. Three independent judges rated all captions along 10 continuous creativity dimensions. Participants also completed Gosling’s brief measure of the Big Five. In a sample of 265 adults from around the world, the reading the mind in the eyes emerged as significantly and positively predictive of 9 of the 10 creativity indices. Regression analyses demonstrated that these relationships existed after controlling for gender and age of participant. Further, of the Big Five traits, conscientiousness emerged as negatively related to several indices of creativity. Implications for the relationship between social-perceptual processes (e.g., empathic accuracy) and social-productive processes (e.g., spontaneous creativity) are discussed.