Development and Validation of the Components of Emotion Understanding Test for a Multicultural Context

Eva Sekwena (Ph.D. student at Ghent University and lecturer at the School of Industrial Psychology and Human Resources Management at Northwest University, Potchefstroom campus: South Africa)

At the background of debates in emotional intelligence literature about the nature of the emotional intelligence construct and how it should be measured (e.g., Pertrides & Furnham, 2001) a call was made for the development of new assessment instruments for emotional intelligence (e.g., Mestre, MacCann, Guil, & Roberts, 2016). In response to that call, Sekwena and Fontaine (2018) developed the Components of Emotion Understanding Test (CEUT: 300 items) to assess emotional understanding from an ability perspective. The CEUT was developed on the basis of the componential emotion approach that conceptualizes emotions as processes elicited by goal-relevant events. The CEUT consists of 10 scenarios with descriptions of goal-relevant events that are characteristic for 10 emotions. These 10 emotions represent the variability in the emotion domain. For each scenario, participants had to rate the likelihood of five emotions, as well as of five appraisals, five action tendencies, five bodily reactions, five expressions, and five subjective feelings that could characterize the emotion process of the main character in the scenario. In study 1, the CEUT- 300 was administered to 132 undergraduate students from diverse cultural backgrounds in South Africa. Using proportion scoring and profile similarities confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the expected one-factorial structure. Emotional understanding correlated positively with verbal cognitive ability, self-report emotional intelligence, and well-being and was negatively correlated with somatic complaints. Moreover, women outscored men, and no difference was observed between respondents with Black African and White cultural backgrounds. In study 2, the CEUT-300 was shortened to 126 items and applied and completed in paper-and-pencil format by 273 black English and white Afrikaans students in South Africa. Using principal component metrics, the measure showed the expected two-factorial structure with a bipolar emotional understanding and a unipolar acquiesce responding component. There was evidence for structural equivalence across black English and white Afrikaans students. Moreover, item bias analyses only showed negligible to small uniform and non-uniform bias. In terms of the nomological network, results showed convergent validity with well-being and intelligence measures and divergent validity with psychopathology. In terms of group differences, no ethnic differences between Blacks and Whites were found, and no differences between males and females. By and large, our results show that the CEUT-126 can be applied to study a central component of ability EI across ethnic groups in South Africa.

Le séminaire aura lieu dans la salle de réunion du CeSCuP ainsi qu’en ligne, via ce lien :

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