Child developmentDate of publication: 08/07/2007 This section is still being developed but will eventually contain complete summaries of studies that have studied child development as it relates to emotional-social intelligence based on the Bar-On model. In the meantime, I have summarized the key studies that I am aware of. Should you wish to share findings from a study that you have conducted or have detailed information on studies that others have conducted focusing on this topic, please use the template provided above for summarizing this study and email it to us (info@reuvenbaron.org). You are invited to provide results that confirm or refute these findings and help us understand this area better. An analysis of variance of the North American normative sample (n=3,831) was conducted to study how emotional-social intelligence changes over time [Bar-On, 1997b]. Although the results indicated a few significant differences between the age groups that were compared, these differences are relatively small in magnitude. In brief, the older groups scored significantly higher than the younger groups on most of the EQ-i scales; and respondents in their late 40s obtained the highest mean scores. An increase in emotional-social intelligence with age is also observed in children [Bar-On & Parker, 2000]. The findings presented here, which are based on a cross-sectional comparison of different age groups, will eventually be compared with findings from an ongoing longitudinal study of the same cohort (n=23,000) over a 25-year period from birth to young adulthood. This will provide a more accurate indication of how emotional-social intelligence develops and changes over time. This study is being conducted by Human Resources Development Canada and has been ongoing for over a decade. It represents the first longitudinal study of emotional-social intelligence and is expected to shed a great deal of light on how this construct develops, what affects it and what is affected by it from birth to early adulthood. The individuals and their parents have been providing a wide array of biomedical, developmental, personality, cognitive, educational, social and behavioral information. Additionally, the subjects have been tested with the youth version of the EQ-i every two years, and they will continue to be tested with the adult version of the EQ-i from 18 years of age onward.
Similar increases in emotional-social intelligence with age have been reported by others based on employing the EQ-i, MEIS and other measures of this construct [Goleman, 1998]. These findings are interesting when one considers that cognitive intelligence increases up until late adolescents and then begins to mildly decline in the second and third decades of life as was originally reported by Wechsler [1958]. The results suggest that as one gets older, one becomes more emotionally and socially intelligent.
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