Mayer and Salovey (1997; Mayer, Caruso, and Salovey, in press) have developed their own test of emotional cognition, called the Mutifactor Emotional Cognition Scale (MEIS). It consists of twelve skill measures that fall into the four classes of skills identified above (perception, assimilation, understanding, and managing emotions). Perception is measured by presenting various stimuli, including faces, abstract designs, music, and stories, and asking people to judge the emotional content reflected in those stimuli. Assimilation is measured by Synesthesia Judgments (describing emotional sensations and their relations to other sense modalities) and Feeling Biases (judgment of how the individual feels toward a fictional person). Understanding is measured by Blends (the skill to blend emotions; e.g., Optimism most closely combines which two emotions?); Progressions (understanding how emotional reactions progress over time); Transitions(understanding how emotions flow from one to another); and Relativity (estimating the feelings of people depicted in a conflictual social encounter). Finally, managing emotions is measured in reference to others and to oneself. Managing feelings of others is measured using brief vignettes about fictional people in need of assistance and asking the respondent to rate the effectiveness of alternative courses of action. Managing feelings of self is measured similarly, but the vignettes describe emotional problems that the individual might encounter.

Mayer et al. (1998) validated the MEIS with 503 adults and 229 adolescents. From a factor analysis of the MEIS, Mayer et al. identified three primary factors corresponding to Perception, Understanding, and Managing emotion, and a higher order, general factor of Emotional Cognition (gei; Mayer et al., in press). General emotional cognition correlated significantly with a measure of verbal cognition (the Army Alpha vocabulary scale; Yerkes, 1921) and a measure of self-reported empathy (Caruso and Mayer, 1997). The investigators also found that the emotional cognition of adults was higher than that of adolescents, suggesting age-related changes. Of the three specific factors, Understanding correlated most highly with verbal cognition, followed by Managing emotions and then Perception. These investigators concluded that emotional cognition can be characterized appropriately as a mental skill because their results follow the patterns of other well-established measures of cognition. The specific skills in the MEIS are intercorrelated, scores on the MEIS develop with age as do scores on other standard cognition tests, and emotional cognition overlaps, to some extent, with traditional cognition.

Schutte et al. (1998) developed their own measure of emotional cognition based on Salovey and Mayer's (1990) model. Their 33-item self-report measure correlated significantly with eight theoretically related constructs, including awareness of emotion, outlook on life, depressed mood, skill to regulate emotions, and impulsivity. They also showed differences on their measure with groups expected to differ in emotional cognition (e.g., psychotherapists and prisoners, men and women). They further showed that scores on indices of emotional cognition were predictive of end-of-year grade-point averages of college freshman, but were unrelated to SAT or ACT scores. Finally, they found that of the big five personality traits, emotional cognition related significantly only to openness to experience.

There appears to be some support for both the construct of social cognition and that of emotional cognition. As yet, there have been no direct efforts aimed at distinguishing social from emotional cognition, and often the two are treated interchangeably. However, there is evidence to suggest that both social and emotional cognition overlap, to some extent, with abstract, academic cognition. This interdependence is not surprising if we take the position that similar mental processes are employed in solving problems of a social, emotional, or academic nature. Sternberg's (1997a) theory of successful cognition, and the triarchic theory subsumed within it, specifies these processes and their relation to successful performance of everyday tasks. Before considering his theory, we briefly review some alternative frameworks of competence or cognition that provide a different perspective on social, emotional, and even abstract cognition.