Unfortunately, recent efforts to define and measure social cognition have not led to any substantial improvement in our understanding of the construct. There appear to be as many definitions and operationalizations of social cognition as there are researchers. The definitions of social cognition reference dimensions such as social perception, social knowledge, social insight, empathy, social memory, and social adaptation. Furthermore, there is little consistency regarding the relationships among measures of social cognition or their relations to measures of academic cognition. Although we acknowledge Cantor and Harlow's (1994) concern regarding the difficulty in measuring social cognition, the construct of tacit knowledge, elaborated upon in other chapters, represents an attempt to quantify context-specific knowledge that is an aspect of practical cognition. Tests of tacit knowledge have been successful in predicting performance (behavioral outcomes) and discriminating practical from abstract or academic cognition (e.g., Sternberg et al., 1993; Sternberg et al., 1995). Before considering the measurement of practical cognition, we discuss another related construct, that of emotional cognition.

2.2 Emotional cognition

Research and theorizing on the construct of emotional cognition (also called, perhaps inappropriately, "emotional intelligence") has a much shorter history in comparison to social cognition. According to Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso (in press), the history of emotional cognition research spans less than a decade. As such, the number of definitions of and approaches to studying emotional cognition are delineated more readily.

Mayer et al. (in press) distinguished between two general models of emotional cognition. Skill models view emotional cognition as the intersection of cognition and emotion. Mixed models define emotional cognition as a combination of mental skill and personality traits. We talk first about the mixed models (e.g., Bar-On, 1997; Goleman, 1995) and their associated measures of emotional cognition. Then we discuss the work of Mayer and Salovey as they attempt to characterize emotional cognition as distinct from personality.

Goleman (1995) brought popular attention to the concept of emotional cognition. He argued, as other researchers have (e.g., Gardner, 1983; Sternberg, 1997a), that cognitive-ability tests and similar tests (e.g., SATs) fail to predict accurately who will succeed in life. Goleman suggested that part of the 80% variance in success unaccounted for by overall cognitive ability could be explained by other characteristics, one of which is emotional cognition. He defined emotional cognition as including "skills such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulses and delay gratification; to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping the skill to think; to empathize and to hope" (p. 34). Although Goleman did not point to any specific test of emotional cognition, he cited support for the construct in research on related factors, such as empathy and ego resilience, which suggests that emotional cognition is distinct from overall cognitive ability.