Emotional intelligence and the dark triad: A meta-analysis

The dark triad is commonly conceived of three subclinical socially aversive and exploitative personality traits: psychopathy, machiavellianism, and narcissism. These traits have been linked to certain abilities that may facilitate the attainment of goals in social interactions, one of which may be emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence encompasses the abilities to perceive emotions correctly, to understand the regularities of emotional functioning, and to regulate one's own and others' emotions. However, it has alternatively also been conceptualized as a set of emotion-related personality characteristics assessed with self-reports (Trait emotional intelligence). The aim of this study was to examine the possible relationships between the dark triad and emotional intelligence. A meta-analysis with a total of 109 effect sizes (6 ≤ ks ≤ 30) culled from 71 studies was conducted. Of the resulting six most relevant combined effect sizes (1561 ≤ Ns ≤ 8127), five were small and negative (−.23 ≤ r¯s ≤ −.13). Only the correlation between narcissism and emotion-related personality characteristics was small and positive (r¯ = .15). In total, the results indicate that the dark triad constructs are only weakly related to emotion-related traits, either conceptualized as abilities or personality characteristics.