Our world is a quantifiable one, and so are people. Assigning numbers to behavioral and cognitive phenomena allows for relationships to be tested, categorizations to be made, and predictions about what people are likely to do. However, scores about people can be misapplied. Imagine an organization that is interested in revamping its culture by emphasizing communication and cooperation across boundaries and in general making the tenor of the interactions among personnel more positive. One key to

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... helping with this may be to focus on employee emotional intelligence (EI), provide assessments of these capacities, and educate where gaps seem apparent. Maybe some employees are having difficulty recognizing their emotions or those of others, which can create problems in social interaction, while others' difficulties stem from challenges to controlling frustrations at work. Depending on the size of the organization, this could be a very involved and 167 costly undertaking. The hope is that the culture will be improved, along with the organizations' efficiency and performance. But what if the predictive validity of EI tests was minimal? This is a valid concern, especially with recent meta-analyses indicating that when cognitive ability and personality measures are controlled for, the relationship between EI measures and a variety of consequential outcomes, such as work outcomes, academic outcomes, and life outcomes, is remarkably small (O'Boyle, Humphrey, Pollack, Hawver, & Story, 2011; Van Rooy & Viswesvaran, 2004) . 1 Such evidence contradicts popular notions surrounding the promise and "big idea" behind EI, in which it was claimed that EI can matter more than IQ in life success (Goleman, 1995) . The evidence also does not align with more recent claims from researchers. For example, Cherniss (2010, p. 184) noted that, "This big idea is that success in work and life depends on more than just the basic cognitive abilities typically measured by IQ tests and related measures; it also depends on a number of personal qualities that involve the perception, understanding, and regulation of emotion." With such concerns regarding the predictive validity of EI, organizational decision makers might not bother following through with the assessments they had planned to help overhaul their organization's culture. However, as researchers, our concern is a different one, and that is to consider ways to increase the predictive value of EI. In this chapter, we offer a set of suggestions for how to refine the way EI is conceptualized to enhance its predictive utility. We aim to do this by creating a synthesis based on two principles: Principle 1: A useful model of EI needs to delineate the nature and influence of the social context in order to understand when and why people apply their EI skills. Principle 2: A useful model of EI needs to integrate fundamental conceptions of how the mind works -namely, by defining the interaction between intuitive (automatic) and deliberative (controlled) mental processes -to fully capture the psychology of EI and the flexibility with which people make sense of their social worlds and are influenced by it. We begin by reviewing briefly the diverse approaches to conceptualizing EI. We then elaborate the two principles of our EI model and discuss their implications for theory, research, and practice. OSCAR YBARRA ET AL. 168