In short: the clearest signs of high emotional intelligence are noticing feelings early (your own and other people's), naming them precisely, choosing a good moment to act on them and calming things down rather than stirring them up. Signs of low emotional intelligence are the reverse: being caught out by other people's reactions, describing feelings only as "good" or "bad", reacting on impulse, and dismissing or "fixing" other people's emotions. Signs point to habits, not a score: people with the weakest skills are often the least aware of it, so a skill test says more than a list.
If you cry easily, your emotional intelligence is low.
Myth. Tears show how strongly you feel, not how well you read or handle feelings. What counts is what you do next: notice the feeling, name it and decide how to act.
People with low emotional intelligence usually know it.
Myth. In three studies, the people who scored lowest on an emotion skill test had the least insight into it, and often dismissed the feedback.
Strong emotional skills can be used to manipulate people.
Fact. Knowing how to regulate emotions made kind people more helpful and scheming people more harmful at work. The skill is neutral; the motive is not.
What counts as a sign of emotional intelligence?
A sign of emotional intelligence is a repeated, everyday behaviour that shows one of four skills at work: perceiving emotions, using them to help thinking, understanding them and managing them. These four branches come from the ability model of Peter Salovey and John Mayer, the most tested definition of emotional intelligence (Mayer, Caruso and Salovey, 2016). Our IQ vs EQ guide explains the model itself; this page is about what each skill looks like from the outside.
Sorting signs by branch matters for two reasons. First, the skills are separate: someone can read faces brilliantly and still lose their temper easily. Second, a single behaviour means little. One sharp reply on a bad day is not a sign of anything. A pattern across weeks and settings is.
Most online lists mix these skills with personality traits such as being friendly, calm or outgoing. Those traits are pleasant, but they are not the same as emotional skill, and the Big Five personality traits describe them better.
Signs of high emotional intelligence
People with high emotional intelligence notice feelings early, describe them precisely, time their reactions well and leave others calmer than they found them. Here is what that looks like in each of the four skills.
Perceiving emotions: they notice what others miss
- They read the gap between words and tone. A colleague says "sure, no problem" through tight lips, and they hear the problem.
- They notice their own feelings while they are still small. They can say "I'm getting annoyed" before the annoyance takes over the conversation.
- They spot who has gone quiet. In a group, they register the person who has stopped joining in, and often make room for them.
Using emotions: they match the mood to the task
- They pick their moment. A hard conversation waits until both people have eaten, slept and cooled down.
- They use moods on purpose. An upbeat mood suits brainstorming; a slightly serious one suits checking a contract. They know which state they are in and plan around it.
- They treat feelings as information. Unease about a deal is a prompt to look again, not something to push aside or obey blindly.
Understanding emotions: they have words for what they feel
- They name feelings precisely. Not just "stressed" but "worried about Monday and a bit resentful that I agreed to it". Research on this skill, called emotion differentiation, links finer-grained labels to fewer harmful ways of coping under intense distress, such as binge drinking or aggression (Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight, 2015).
- They understand mixed feelings. They know a person can be proud and sad at a leaving party, and don't take either feeling as the whole story.
- They can predict where a feeling is heading. They expect irritation to become anger if a problem is ignored, and relief to follow once uncertain news arrives.
Managing emotions: they calm things down
- They rethink before they react. Looking at a situation another way ("she's under pressure, not attacking me") tends to work better than bottling a feeling up. In five studies, people who habitually reappraised felt more positive emotion and had better relationships, while habitual suppressors felt more negative emotion and had worse ones (Gross and John, 2003).
- They help others settle. They listen first and fix later, and people tend to leave a conversation with them feeling better.
- They recover. They still get angry, hurt or anxious, but they come back to balance and can repair a conversation that went wrong.
That last branch seems to matter most for everyday friendships. Students who scored higher on the managing branch of a skill test had better-quality interactions with friends, as rated both by the students and by two of their friends, even after personality was taken into account (Lopes and others, 2004).
Signs that look like flaws but can be healthy
Some behaviours read as rude or cold at first glance and are in fact emotionally skilled:
- Saying no without a long apology, because they know what they can take on.
- Leaving a heated conversation with "I need ten minutes", then coming back to finish it.
- Showing irritation openly and in proportion, instead of smiling and resenting it later.
- Not rushing to cheer someone up, because sitting with a sad friend often helps more than a pep talk.
High vs low emotional intelligence, side by side
The difference between high and low emotional intelligence is rarely about how strongly someone feels; it is about how early they notice a feeling and how well they handle it. Choose a skill to compare everyday examples. These are illustrations for reflection, not a test.
| Skill | Higher emotional intelligence | Lower emotional intelligence |
|---|---|---|
| Perceiving emotionsNoticing feelings in faces, voices and yourself | Hears the flat tone in "I'm fine" and asks again later, gently | Takes "I'm fine" at face value and is surprised when the row comes |
| Perceiving emotions | Notices their own irritation building before it shows | Realises they were angry only after they have snapped |
| Using emotionsMatching a mood to the task in hand | Saves a difficult conversation for a moment when both people are calm | Fires off the furious reply straight away |
| Using emotions | Brainstorms when upbeat, checks the detail when steady | Tries careful work while upset, then blames the task |
| Understanding emotionsKnowing what causes a feeling and where it leads | Describes mixed feelings precisely: "disappointed, and a bit relieved" | Has three settings: good, bad and stressed |
| Understanding emotions | Expects a change of plan to annoy people and explains it early | Is puzzled when news lands badly |
| Managing emotionsHandling your own feelings and helping others with theirs | Pauses, looks at the situation another way, then responds | Bottles feelings up, or lets them all out at once |
| Managing emotions | Lets a friend feel heard before offering any fixes | Jumps to advice, a joke or a change of subject |
Our free EQ test reports the same four skills, so if one column feels uncomfortably familiar, it shows which skill to look at.
Signs of low emotional intelligence
The most common signs of low emotional intelligence are being repeatedly surprised by other people's feelings, having few words for your own, reacting on impulse and brushing off or "fixing" emotions instead of hearing them. Again, each sign belongs to one skill.
Perceiving: missing the signals
- Being blindsided by a partner's or colleague's anger that others saw building for weeks.
- Telling a joke at the wrong moment, such as at a funeral or just after bad news, because the mood in the room didn't register.
- Not noticing their own stress until it shows up as a headache, a short temper or a sleepless night.
Using: letting the mood run the show
- Making big decisions, such as quitting or buying, in the heat of a strong mood.
- Starting serious talks at the worst times: late at night, in front of others, or while still furious.
Understanding: a small emotional vocabulary
- Describing every unpleasant state as "fine", "stressed" or "annoyed".
- Not seeing how their own actions led to someone else's reaction, so the same argument repeats.
- Expecting a feeling to vanish once the facts are explained ("I said sorry, so why are you still upset?").
Managing: all or nothing
- Swinging between holding everything in and sudden outbursts over small things.
- Treating feedback as an attack: arguing, blaming others or going silent for hours.
- Responding to someone's distress with advice, a lecture or "you're overreacting".
- Rarely apologising, or apologising in a way that blames the other person ("I'm sorry you feel that way").
Lack of emotional intelligence: everyday examples
These four short scenes show how a lack of emotional skill plays out, and what would have changed the outcome.
Their manager keeps pressing on with the agenda and later calls them "difficult".
More skilled: Noticing the change and asking one-to-one what is going on.
The reply is a list of everything the other person did for them last week.
More skilled: Hearing the feeling first, then talking about the facts.
The listener turns it into a story about their own success.
More skilled: Staying with the friend's moment and asking about it.
The person argues every point, then sulks for the afternoon.
More skilled: Asking questions, taking a break, deciding what to use.
What else can look like low emotional intelligence
Before labelling anyone, it helps to know that several other things produce the same signs:
- Stress, illness and lack of sleep make everyone worse at reading and handling emotions for a while.
- Alexithymia, a trait involving difficulty identifying and describing your own feelings, is not the same as a lack of care. It is especially common in autism: in a meta-analysis of 15 studies, about half of autistic participants scored in the alexithymia range, against about 5% of non-autistic participants (Kinnaird, Stewart and Tchanturia, 2019).
- Culture and language shape how openly feelings are shown and named. Someone speaking a second language may simply lack the words.
- Low mood can flatten expression and make someone seem uninterested when they are struggling.
What is not a sign of emotional intelligence?
Being nice, being calm all the time, being outgoing and feeling things deeply are not, on their own, signs of high emotional intelligence. Popular lists often include them, but they describe temperament more than skill.
- Always being agreeable. Avoiding every conflict can mean someone is managing their own discomfort, not the situation.
- Never showing emotion. A permanent poker face can be suppression, which tends to cost more than it saves.
- Being talkative or popular. Extraversion helps people start conversations, not read them.
- Always being "right" about what others feel. Skilled people check their guesses; they don't announce them.
High emotional intelligence is also not the same as being a good person. In two studies, knowing how to regulate emotions amplified what people already leaned towards: among those with more of this knowledge, a strong moral identity went with more helping, and Machiavellian traits went with more harm to colleagues (Côté and others, 2011). Charm that leaves you confused about what you agreed to is not a sign to admire.
Signs of emotional intelligence in a relationship
In a relationship, emotional intelligence shows most clearly during disagreements: whether each partner can notice the other's hurt, stay in the conversation and repair it afterwards. Couples research finds that higher emotional intelligence goes with greater relationship satisfaction, for the person and for their partner (Malouff and others, 2014; the figures are in our IQ vs EQ guide).
Signs of a partner with high emotional intelligence: they ask how you are and wait for the real answer; they can say "I was wrong" without a speech; they remember what upsets you and avoid it; and after a row they come back to talk rather than pretending it never happened.
Signs of low emotional intelligence in a partner: they answer "what's wrong?" with "nothing" and then go silent for days; your feelings are met with "you're too sensitive"; every complaint is matched with a counter-complaint; and arguments end with someone leaving the room, never with an apology. Low emotional intelligence in a parent often looks similar: a child's tears are met with "stop crying" or a distraction, rather than a name for the feeling.
A skill gap is different from control. If a partner uses emotions to frighten, isolate or punish you, that is not a matter of emotional intelligence, and support services can help. For ways to build these skills together, see how to improve emotional intelligence.
Signs of emotional intelligence at work
At work, emotional intelligence shows in how people handle pressure, feedback and other people's frustration. A manager who notices a struggling team member early, or a colleague who calms an angry customer, is using the same four skills described above. The research suggests these skills count most in jobs with a lot of emotional contact with people, such as customer service (Joseph and Newman, 2010). Our guide to emotional intelligence at work covers workplace signs, a boss who lacks it and the job-performance evidence.
Signs of emotional intelligence in men and women
The signs of high and low emotional intelligence are the same for men and women; the two groups differ only slightly on average, and far less than stereotypes suggest. The largest review so far pooled 1,011 studies of how accurately people read emotion in faces, bodies and voices. Women came out a little ahead, by a small effect of d = 0.24 (Hall, Gunnery and Schlegel, 2025). Drawn as two bell curves, that gap almost disappears:
Women and men read emotions almost equally well
Accuracy at reading emotion cues, drawn from the pooled effect size d = 0.24 and assuming bell-shaped scores; the overlap and the 57 in 100 are calculated from it.
So a man and a woman picked at random are almost as likely to be either way round. Judge the person in front of you by the signs above, not by their gender. A Spanish study of 12,198 adults that used the MSCEIT, a skill test of all four branches, also found women scoring higher on average (Cabello and others, 2016).
Signs of emotional intelligence in children and teens
In children, the signs of emotional intelligence are age-appropriate versions of the adult ones: naming feelings, noticing when a friend is sad and gradually needing less help to calm down. A toddler's tantrum is not a sign of low emotional intelligence; it is a normal stage, and the skill lies in how quickly, with an adult's help, they settle.
- Toddlers and young children: use feeling words ("I'm cross"), look at a parent's face to check how to react, and bring a toy to a crying sibling.
- School-age children: explain why they feel something ("I'm sad because Sam played with someone else"), understand that two people can feel differently about the same event, and recover from small disappointments.
- Teens: notice their own moods and their triggers, read friends' moods online and in person, and know when to talk to someone.
Children's understanding of emotions is linked to their social skills: a meta-analysis found small to medium relationships between emotion knowledge and social competence, and fewer behaviour problems, in childhood and adolescence (Trentacosta and Fine, 2010). These are links, not proof that one causes the other. For ways parents can help, see how to improve emotional intelligence; our EQ test is for adults and older teens.
Why you can't judge emotional intelligence from a list of signs
Lists of signs are useful prompts for reflection, but they can't measure emotional intelligence, because people are poor judges of their own emotional skills. Three findings show why.
- The least skilled overrate themselves most. In three studies of professional students, those who scored lowest on an emotion skill test had little insight into how they had done. Given feedback, they questioned its accuracy or relevance, and were less interested than top scorers in improving (Sheldon, Dunning and Ames, 2014).
- Self-ratings and tested skill don't line up well. When people rated themselves on the same four branches that a skill test measures, their ratings and test scores were not strongly correlated (Brackett and others, 2006).
- Self-rated "EQ" is largely personality. Questionnaire scores overlap heavily with the broad factor the Big Five traits share (van der Linden and others, 2017), which a Big Five personality test measures directly.
So if you read the high-EI list above and recognised yourself in every line, that is not strong evidence either way. The same goes for diagnosing a partner or parent from a list. A test with best answers, ideally compared with how you rate yourself, gives a fairer picture. Our guide to emotional intelligence tests compared explains the main options, and our EQ test does both and shows where they disagree.
Frequently asked questions
Is crying a sign of emotional intelligence?
Crying is not a sign of high or low emotional intelligence on its own. It shows that a feeling is strong. Emotional intelligence shows in what surrounds the tears: whether you can tell what you feel and why, and whether you choose a sensible time and place to deal with it.
Is empathy a sign of high emotional intelligence?
Empathy is part of emotional intelligence, but it is not the whole of it. Picking up and understanding what others feel draws on the perceiving and understanding branches. Someone can feel deeply for others and still struggle to manage their own reactions, so empathy alone does not mean high emotional intelligence.
Is overthinking a sign of high emotional intelligence?
Overthinking is not a sign of high emotional intelligence. Thinking about your feelings helps when it leads somewhere, such as naming a feeling or planning a reply. Going over the same worry again and again, without reaching a decision, points more to difficulty managing emotions than to skill.
Are the signs of low emotional intelligence different in men and women?
The signs are the same in men and women, but the averages differ slightly. In a meta-analysis of 1,011 studies (837,637 people), women were a little better at reading emotions from faces, bodies and voices, with a small effect (d = 0.24). In a Spanish sample of 12,198 adults, women also scored higher on a four-branch skill test of emotional intelligence. The overlap is large, so a person's gender tells you little about their own skills.
What does extremely low emotional intelligence look like?
Very low emotional intelligence usually looks like a pattern across all four skills: regularly missing how others feel, having few words for your own feelings, being surprised by reactions that others saw coming, and swinging between bottling things up and outbursts. The same picture can come from stress, depression, alexithymia or a lack of sleep, so it is not something to diagnose from a list. If it is causing problems at home or work, a GP, counsellor or psychologist can help.
What does extremely high emotional intelligence look like?
Extremely high emotional intelligence usually looks quiet rather than dramatic: someone who reads a room accurately, stays steady under pressure and helps others calm down without fuss. It does not mean feeling everything intensely or always being agreeable. People at the top of skill tests are also more willing to keep learning, not less.
Is emotional intelligence a skill or a personality trait?
Emotional intelligence can be studied as either, and the two give different answers. Skill tests with best answers treat it as an ability, while questionnaires measure how you see your own emotional habits, which overlaps heavily with personality. Our guide to emotional intelligence tests compared explains the difference.
How do you know if you have low emotional intelligence?
You can't know for sure from how you feel about yourself, because self-ratings and tested skill often disagree. Useful clues are repeated surprises: people often seem upset with you and you didn't see it coming, or the same argument keeps happening. A skill-based test, or honest feedback from people who know you, is a better guide than a checklist.
What causes low emotional intelligence in adults?
No single cause explains low emotional intelligence in adults. Emotional skills develop through experience and practice, scores on skill tests vary with age, and stress, tiredness and some conditions can make them harder to use. The skills can also be built later in life.
Can someone with low emotional intelligence change?
Yes, emotional skills can improve with practice and training, though change is gradual and works best when the person wants it. Our guide on how to improve emotional intelligence covers what helps.
How do you deal with someone who has low emotional intelligence?
Be clear and specific, because hints and hurt silences are easy for them to miss. Name the feeling and the request in one plain sentence, raise problems when things are calm, and judge them on what they do rather than what they say they feel. If the behaviour is frightening or controlling, that is not a skill gap to work around: seek support.
What are the five characteristics of emotional intelligence?
The five characteristics most often listed come from Daniel Goleman's popular model: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill. They are a broader set than the four branches researchers test as abilities, which is why lists of "characteristics" vary so much from one article to the next.
Sources
- Mayer, Caruso and Salovey (2016), Emotion Review: the four-branch ability model of emotional intelligence, principles and updates.
- Goleman (1998), Harvard Business Review, "What Makes a Leader?": the five components of the popular model.
- Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight (2015), Current Directions in Psychological Science: emotion differentiation (putting feelings into precise words).
- Gross and John (2003), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: reappraisal and suppression, affect, relationships and well-being.
- Lopes and others (2004), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: managing emotions and the quality of social interactions.
- Côté and others (2011), Psychological Science: emotion-regulation knowledge and both prosocial and deviant behaviour.
- Kinnaird, Stewart and Tchanturia (2019), European Psychiatry: alexithymia in autism, a systematic review and meta-analysis.
- Malouff, Schutte and Thorsteinsson (2014), American Journal of Family Therapy: emotional intelligence and romantic relationship satisfaction.
- Joseph and Newman (2010), Journal of Applied Psychology: meta-analysis of emotional intelligence and job performance, including emotional labour.
- Trentacosta and Fine (2010), Social Development: emotion knowledge, social competence and behaviour problems in children and teens.
- Sheldon, Dunning and Ames (2014), Journal of Applied Psychology: low scorers on emotional intelligence overrate themselves and dismiss feedback.
- Brackett and others (2006), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: self-report and skill measures of emotional intelligence compared.
- van der Linden and others (2017), Psychological Bulletin: overlap between emotional intelligence and the general factor of personality.
- Hall, Gunnery and Schlegel (2025), Journal of Intelligence: gender and accuracy in reading emotion cues, a meta-analysis.
- Cabello and others (2016), Developmental Psychology: age and gender differences in ability emotional intelligence in adults.
This guide is for self-understanding. It is not a clinical assessment, and none of the signs above is a diagnosis.
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