About the test
Emotional intelligence test
Explore how you notice, show and respond to emotions, your own and other people’s. This free test uses seven public-domain IPIP scales developed by Kimberly Barchard and gives you a profile across seven components rather than a single EQ score.
Questionnaire / instrument: IPIP (Barchard, 2001)
The test at a glance
- Price
- Free, including your results
- Registration
- No account required
- Length
- 68 statements
- Time
- About 8 minutes
- Format
- Self-report · five response options
- Your report
- Seven components · no total score
The seven components
Each component is a separate IPIP scale with 9 or 10 statements. The report uses these names; the original scale names come from Barchard (2001):
Attending to emotions
Noticing and thinking about your own feelings, including why you feel the way you do. Source scale: Attending to Emotions.
Showing positive feelings
Expressing joy, affection and warmth openly. Source scale: Positive Expressivity.
Showing negative feelings
Letting others see sadness, fear and anger. Source scale: Negative Expressivity.
Feelings in decisions
Letting feelings, not only logic, guide your choices. A low score means you prefer to decide on facts and reasoning, which is not a weakness. Source scale: Emotion-based Decision-making.
Sharing others’ joy
Being lifted by other people’s happiness and getting caught up when others celebrate. Source scale: Responsive Joy.
Moved by others’ distress
Being affected when others suffer. A low score can mean you stay calm in tense situations. Source scale: Responsive Distress.
Empathic concern
Caring about people who are worse off, including those who have made mistakes. Source scale: Empathic Concern.
What your results show
Your result is calculated as soon as you have answered the last statement. You can preview the layout with an example report before taking the test.
- Seven component scores from 0 to 100, each marked low, medium or high.
- A short description of what your level means for each component.
- An explanation of self-reported (trait) emotional intelligence and why the profile has no total score.
What does it measure?
Seven self-reported emotional tendencies: positive and negative expressivity, attention to emotions, emotion-based decisions, responsive joy, responsive distress and empathic concern.
Where does it come from?
Kimberly Barchard developed these IPIP scales in work on emotional and social intelligence. IPIP describes them as components potentially related to emotional intelligence.
How is the result calculated?
Keyed responses are averaged within each of the seven scales. The report presents a profile of emotional habits and reactions, with scores rescaled to 0–100.
What can the result tell you?
This is a self-report questionnaire, not an ability test with right and wrong answers or a validated overall EQ score. Higher is not necessarily better on every scale, and the scores are not population percentiles. Some scales have modest internal consistency in the source data, around .6 for responsive distress, so small differences are uncertain.
Languages and adaptations
English follows the source instrument. Our other language versions include AI-assisted translations that have not been independently validated. Our explanations and result commentary are written for this website.
Frequently asked questions
Is the test free, including the results?
Yes. You can answer all the statements and read your full report without paying or creating an account.
Does the test give me an EQ score?
No. You get seven separate scores. There is no validated way to add them up, and a total would mix tendencies that are not all desirable at high levels, such as being strongly shaken by other people’s distress.
Is this an ability test?
No. Ability tests ask you to solve emotional tasks with right and wrong answers. This questionnaire asks how well statements describe you, often called trait emotional intelligence. How you see yourself and how you perform on such tasks can differ, so the result describes your self-image, not your skill.
Is a higher score always better?
No. A high score on Feelings in decisions means you rely on emotions when choosing, and a low score means you rely on logic; neither is better. Being strongly moved by others’ distress can show empathy but can also be draining. Read each component as a description of a habit.
Who am I compared with?
Nobody. There are no published norms for these scales, so a score shows where your answers fall between 0 and 100. Low means an average answer below 2.5 on the five-point scale and high means above 3.5, the same limits as our other IPIP tests.
How accurate is the test?
Each scale has only 9 or 10 statements. In Barchard’s data, internal consistency (alpha) ranged from about .6 for responsive distress to just over .8 for positive expressivity and attending to emotions. Treat small differences between components as uncertain. Our translations have not been validated separately.
How is it related to the Big Five?
Several components are related to Big Five traits, especially agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism. The Big Five test describes your personality more broadly and compares your scores with other test takers.
License and reuse
Public domainIPIP places its items and scales in the public domain. They may be used, copied, adapted and translated for commercial and non-commercial purposes without a fee or separate permission.
The terms below apply to the test materials. Articles, translations, software and our result descriptions may have separate terms.
Sources and further reading
Barchard, K. A. (2001). Emotional and social intelligence: Examining its place in the nomological network. Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia.