Differences between multimedia and text-based assessments of emotion management: An exploration with the multimedia emotion management assessment (MEMA)

• Main Authors: MacCANN, Carolyn, LIEVENS, Filip, LIBBRECHT, Nele, ROBERTS, Richard D.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Emotional intelligence; emotion management; situational judgment test; multimedia assessment; academic achievement; Human Resources Management; Industrial and Organizational Psychology; Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5715; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/6714/viewcontent/MEMA__1_.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

People process emotional information using visual, vocal, and verbal cues. However, emotion management is typically assessed with text based rather than multimedia stimuli. This study (N=427) presents the new multimedia emotion management assessment (MEMA) and compares it to the text-based assessment of emotion management used in the MSCEIT. The text-based and multimedia assessment showed similar levels of cognitive saturation and similar prediction of relevant criteria. Results demonstrate that the MEMA scores have equivalent evidence of validity to the text-based MSCEIT test scores, demonstrating that multimedia assessment of emotion management is viable. Furthermore, our results inform the debate as to whether cognitive saturation in emotional intelligence (EI) measures represents noise or substance. We find that cognitive ability associations with EI represent substantive variance rather than construct-irrelevant shared variance due to reading comprehension ability required for text-based items.