You’re smart, you’re hardworking and you have a vision for your career and your life. But these aren’t the only ingredients to unlocking your success. In fact, many of the brightest and most ambitious people struggle in their careers or personal lives. If you really want to reach your full potential, a free emotional intelligence test can play an important role.
What is an emotional intelligence test?
Emotional intelligence, often referred to as “EQ” or “EI,” encapsulates the ability to recognize, evaluate and manage one’s own emotions. Those with high emotional intelligence are defined by their ability to better acknowledge and respond to the emotions of others. They do so with self-awareness, understanding and empathy.
High EQ can be practiced and learned, and the benefits affect nearly every aspect of your life. In fact, emotional intelligence contributes to career success so profoundly that companies actively seek high EQ candidates.
Emotional intelligence tests range from short online quizzes taking a few minutes to longer appraisals. These EQ tests provide the user brief scenarios to easily quantify emotional intelligence along one or more dimensions such as self-awareness, social skills, personal motivation and empathy.
Tests range from multiple-choice challenges to Likert scales—that is, answering along a range of options such as “agree,” “neutral” or “disagree.” In either case, the questions are expertly designed to accurately appraise emotional intelligence.
What are the benefits of online emotional intelligence assessments?
Taking a free emotional intelligence test online may demand a few minutes to an hour of your time. In return, these tests provide an opportunity to explore inward and assess your emotional strengths and areas in need of attention. They also help you identify patterns both positive and negative in your daily interactions. Rather than repeating the same mistakes due to habitual blind spots, you learn to better regulate your emotions and enhance your interactions with others.
As with any skill, emotional intelligence is not a fixed or inherent quality. You can learn and improve your EQ. Approach every EQ quiz with a growth mindset and a willingness to embrace personal development. With work, you can move from setbacks to growth and abundance in your career, family life and overall happiness and well-being.
What are the best free emotional intelligence tests online?
Free online EQ tests are easy to find, but that doesn’t mean you get the best or most accurate. As with any test, low reliability can waste more than your time—it can send you seeking answers for issues that don’t exist.
In choosing the best online EQ appraisals, we looked at several factors including:
- Frequent use by academia and the corporate world
- Ease of use
- Results that provide data in multiple dimensions of emotional intelligence
- Immediacy of results at low or no cost
With these factors in mind, let’s look at the most reliable emotional intelligence tests that are free to take online. We recommend using several for an even broader understanding of yourself, both in terms of your strengths and areas in need of improvement.
1. GlobaLeadership Foundation
With a mission to develop emotionally healthy leaders, the GlobaLeadership Foundation aspires to help businesses solve social and environmental issues globally. This free emotional intelligence quiz consists of just 40 multiple-choice questions and takes about 10 minutes to complete. It is designed to offer insight on your self-awareness, social awareness, relationship management and more.
2. Last Eight Percent
The Last Eight Percent serves organizations by providing guidance in team building and leadership training, both of which require adept emotional intelligence. With just 20 questions, this free online emotional intelligence test takes little time but can offer great insights. Once completed, you will receive more than results. You also get recommendations for personal development in areas such as managing emotions and skillful communications.
3. Truity
Truity serves as a national leader in serving businesses with highly accurate personality tests. Featured by LinkedIn News, the Chicago Tribune and Bloomberg Technology, Truity provides tests for individuals, teams and even clients. This emotional intelligence test is free to use but will require an email registration. The test’s 55 questions are designed to assess five areas of EQ to help you in areas of relationships and communications.
4. Psychology Today
A leader in mental health and well-being, Psychology Today provides dozens of online tests in areas of IQ, personality, career guidance and more. The online EQ assessment is unsurprisingly comprehensive, requiring approximately 45 minutes of your time. You will receive a free snapshot of your results, including a graph and outline, but for $9.95, you can also receive a more comprehensive evaluation of your test.
5. Greater Good Magazine at Berkeley
How good are you at reading the expressions of others? Our faces can reflect shame, surprise, pain and even flirtation. Reading those facial cues plays a large role in human interaction, but not everyone is skilled at it. This free online emotional intelligence quiz provides images of human faces to assess your ability to pick up on facial cues in daily interactions.
6. Mind Help
Mind Help advocates for better mental health across the spectra of life including professional development, personal happiness and better family relations. With only 15 simple questions, this simple emotional intelligence test challenges users to better understand their own emotions and responses to the feelings of others. Completely free to take, the short test provides an immediate EQ score as well as a brief on your results.
7. Mind Tools
Mind Tools exists with a mission to assist individuals in their personal development goals. These include leadership, decision-making and, of course, emotional intelligence. The free emotional intelligence quiz consists of only 15 questions and takes just a couple of minutes. You provide your responses on a Likert scale, and once completed, you receive an immediate EQ rating.
8. PsychTests
PsychTests offers multiple tests including IQ, reasoning, verbal and other assessments vital to success both personally and professionally. The in-depth online emotional intelligence test consists of more than 300 questions and can take an hour or more to complete. The assessment uses the online environment to its fullest advantage with images and multiple-choice and Likert-scale queries. You will receive a personalized snapshot of your EQ for free with the option to purchase full results.
9. Make It at CNBC
With only 10 questions, this online quiz from Make it at CNBC takes only a couple of minutes. You will choose from multiple choice responses to various situations. In this case, there are right and wrong answers. While the results won’t yield deep insights into your EQ, you can gain insight by analyzing the questions and modeling the best responses.
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