The interaction between emotional intelligence and cognitive ability in predicting scholastic performance in school-aged children

The aim of the present study is to offer an exploration of the predictive validity of cognitive ability and emotional intelligence (EI) on scholastic achievement in a sample of Italian school-aged children (8–11 years). In particular, cognitive ability was measured through Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices, while trait EI was measured through the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire–Child Form (TEIQue-CF). In addition to trait EI, we measured also a basic emotional ability, the emotion recognition ability, through an emotional face recognition task. The results demonstrated an interaction between trait EI and cognitive ability in predicting academic performance. In particular, trait EI was positively associated with better language performance in children characterised by low or medium cognitive ability, but not in pupils characterised by high cognitive ability. Moreover, results showed that trait EI had a unique power to predict math performance. Similarly, the analyses showed an interaction between emotion recognition ability and cognitive ability in predicting both language and math performance. Differences between the two emotional measures were discussed.