Speed and Smarts: Examining the Relationship Between Measures of Inspection Time, General Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, and Global Processing Ability

Abstract

This research investigated an expanded definition of intelligence that includes an individual’s performance on both general and emotional intelligence measures. Specifically, this study operationally defines global processing ability as an individual’s mean score on two psychological measures: an IQ measure (i.e. Raven’s Progressive Matrices) and an EI measure (i.e. Situational Test of Emotional Understanding). From there, I examined the relationship between inspection time for faces (i.e. emotional stimuli) and letters (i.e. non-emotional stimuli) with global processing ability, IQ, and EI. Results reveal that performance on inspection time for letters and faces independently predicted EI, IQ, and global processing ability. The experiment was constructed using open-source software and administered to 38 (n=38) participants that were recruited to take part in this experiment using Amazon’s MTurk. Further analysis and implications for the findings of this study, as well as avenues for future research, are formally discussed.