An
Exploratory Study of Emotional Intelligence and Domestic Abuse
Abstract
To
date, there is no literature specifically addressing the relationship between
spousal battering and emotional intelligence, a concept that captures the
success, or lack thereof, of a person's functioning in their immediate
environment. Forty-four men convicted of spousal assault and 76 undergraduate
students completed the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i; R. Bar-On, BarOn
Emotional Quotient Inventory: User's Manual, Multi-Health Systems, Inc.,
Toronto, 1997), the Propensity for Abusiveness Scale (PAS; D. G. Dutton, J.
Fam. Violence 10(2): 203–221, 1995), and the Balanced Inventory of
Desirable Responding (D. Paulhus, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 46: 598–609,
1984; Assessing Self-Deception and Impression Management in Self-Reports: The
Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding, Unpublished manual, University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 1988; In Measures of Personality and
Social Psychological Attitudes, Academic Press, San Diego, CA, pp. 17–59,
1991). Results of this exploratory study indicate that batterers score
significantly lower than the general population on all components of EQ-i.
Additionally EQ-i total and subscale scores for both samples correlate
negatively and significantly with scores on PAS, suggesting that deficits in
various components of emotional intelligence are related to an increase in the
propensity to be abusive. Implications for batterer treatment are discussed.
