Sources & methodology

This is the most important thing on the page.

Some assessments can tell you where you sit relative to other people, because a large public dataset of real scores exists to compare against. For these seven scales there is no such dataset. The scales were validated on a community sample that was never published for others to use, and no average scores for them appear anywhere we could find.

We had two options: invent boundaries and let them look like percentiles, or say plainly what we do and don’t have. We chose the second.

Your range describes how you answered — whether these statements sounded like you, sounded like the opposite of you, or landed in between. It does not describe how you compare with anyone. Nothing in your report says or implies that you are higher or lower than other people on any of these seven, because we have no basis for saying it.

One consequence you can see for yourself: the boundaries below are identical for all seven scales. Where boundaries are drawn from real score data, they usually differ per trait, because people score differently on different traits. Here they are drawn from the answer scale itself, so there is nothing to make them differ.

These are two different things, and the difference is the most common thing people ask about.

Where you sit is your exact result, shown as a position along the line. Your range is one of five bands, and each band covers a stretch of results. The range name and the description come from the band. The position on the line comes from your result.

So two things can happen that look odd at first:

• Two people sit some distance apart on the line and still get the same words, because both results land inside one range.
• Two people sit close together and get different words, because a boundary happens to fall between them.

Neither view is the “real” one. The line is more precise. The range is what a description can be written for, because a description has to cover a stretch rather than every possible result.

Each scale runs between two named ends — Guarded and Open, Steady and Moved, and so on. Both ends are real things a person can be glad to be. Neither is the healthy one.

That is why you will not see “high” or “low” anywhere in your result. Those words carry a verdict these scales cannot support, and the name of the instrument already pushes hard enough in that direction. Each range has its own name per scale instead.

There is also no total score, and that is deliberate. The seven scales are measured separately and do not add up to an emotional intelligence number. A result on one says nothing about the others. If you have seen a product give you a single “EQ score”, that number was a choice someone made about how to combine things that do not combine.

The four groups your report sorts the scales into — what you let show; what rubs off on you; before anyone else is involved; how far your caring reaches — are a reading aid, nothing more. They are not sub-scores and they do not sum either.

Each scale is scored on its own. Reverse-worded questions are flipped first, and your result is the average of your answers to that scale’s questions on the 1–5 agreement scale, where 1 is “very inaccurate” and 5 is “very accurate”.

The boundaries sit symmetrically around 3.00, the middle of that answer scale. An average of exactly 3.00 means the statements on that scale sounded neither like you nor unlike you. The two outer ranges are wider than the three in the middle, because answers that far out are further from the midpoint in the first place.

The instruction before the questions asks you to describe yourself in relation to other people you know who are roughly your same age. The standard IPIP wording also asks you to picture people of the same sex as you. We took that half out. We never ask your sex, and nothing in this report is worked out separately by sex, so it named a comparison group the result then makes no use of.

So there is a comparison in this, and it is worth being straight about where it sits: it happened in your head while you answered, against people you happen to know. It is not a comparison we then made against any dataset. That is a real limitation rather than a technicality — two people with identical habits can answer differently because they are surrounded by different people.

The 68 questions are the IPIP Emotional Intelligence Scales, taken from the International Personality Item Pool. The items are used unmodified, with the published scoring key. 31 of them are reverse-worded, so agreeing with everything does not push a scale to one end.

The scales were developed by Kathryn A. Barchard: Barchard, K. A. (2001). Seven components potentially related to emotional intelligence. Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia.

We name the seven for what they describe. Barchard named them for the literature, and if you want to look the research up, those are the names to search:

• Showing Warmth — published as Positive Expressivity
• Showing Upset — published as Negative Expressivity
• Catching Joy — published as Responsive Joy
• Catching Pain — published as Responsive Distress
• Inward Attention — published as Attending to Emotions
• Head or Heart — published as Emotion-Based Decision-Making
• Reach of Care — published as Empathic Concern

IPIP is a public-domain item bank, so there is no legal requirement to credit it. We do it anyway, because “built on published, open research” is only worth saying if you can check it. The item text and the scoring key are here:

• https://ipip.ori.org/newEmotionalIntelligenceKey.htm — item text and scoring key

Item text verified against that page on 2026-08-02. License: Public domain (International Personality Item Pool). Items unmodified.

IPIP publishes a scoring key for these scales but no question order. The order you answered them in is ours: the seven scales are interleaved, so you never answer nine questions in a row about the same thing.

No affiliation or endorsement. SelfWyse is independent. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the International Personality Item Pool project, Dr. Barchard, or the Oregon Research Institute.

The usual check is whether the questions behind a scale agree with each other. It is reported as a number between 0 and 1, where above 0.70 is generally treated as acceptable and above 0.80 as good. Below are the figures Barchard published, reported separately for women and men as they were in the original.

Not all seven are equally solid, and you should know which. Catching Pain is the loosest of the set on both figures, meaning its questions pull in noticeably different directions — treat a result there as rougher than the others. Head or Heart and Reach of Care each fall under the threshold for one of the two groups. On any of those, give more weight to whether the description sounds like you than to exactly where the marker landed.

There are no figures of our own next to these yet. Calculating them needs a large sample of completed responses, and we do not have one for this questionnaire yet. When we do, they will go on this page next to the published ones — including if they come out worse.

Measuring the right thing. Barchard built these seven scales to test whether things commonly bundled together as emotional intelligence are in fact separate. They largely are, which is why you get seven results and not one. What that record does not include is evidence that these scores predict anything outside the questionnaire, and we have not run a study of our own.

Barchard’s scales are filed in the research literature under emotional intelligence, and that is the phrase most people search for, so it is what our test page is called. The report is called Emotional Style instead, because that is what the seven results describe.

The word intelligence claims two things these scales cannot support: that more is better, and that the seven add up to a score. Neither is true here. There is no total, and three of the seven are arguably harder to live with at the high end than the low one.

They are self-report questions about what you tend to do. They are not a test of how well you do it, and nothing here measures an ability. Barchard, who built them, is explicit that these measure personality rather than skill. More of something is not better at something.

The practical version: nobody “passes” this. Someone at one end of Catching Pain is not worse at feelings someone at the other end — they are describing a different thing that happens in them when someone else is upset.

Worth reading before you read that section of your report.

Six of Reach of Care’s 10 questions ask about strangers in difficulty — people out of work, people who are poor, people who have broken the law. Answering those means saying what you think people in that position are owed, not only what you feel when you see them.

So this one measures your views at least as much as your feelings, and it is the easiest of the seven to mistake for a verdict on someone. Two people can care about the people in their lives exactly as much and land at opposite ends of it, because they disagree about responsibility rather than about kindness.

We kept the scale intact rather than dropping it or quietly rewording questions, on the basis that the honest thing is to run it and say what it is. Your report puts it in a group on its own for the same reason.

selfwyse helps you reflect and connect — not to diagnose, treat, or predict any medical, psychological, or mental health condition. It is a self-report questionnaire: it records how you answered 68 questions on one particular day, and people’s answers do move over time.

How expressive you think you are and how expressive you look to other people can be some distance apart, and this measures the first. Neither view is the true one.

It is not for hiring, promotion, performance review, medical or mental health decisions, legal proceedings, or anything else with serious consequences for you or anyone else. The full version of that is on the disclaimer page.