While the association of psychometric intelligence with religious belief has been studied for over 100 years now, the role of emotional intelligence in this context has been poorly investigated so far. Some available data indicate that emotional intelligence, unlike cognitive one, correlates positively with human religiosity. Up to date, however, no study has explored the relationship between religiosity and both intelligences simultaneously. Taking this into consideration, we decided to examine the association between ability emotional intelligence and religiosity controlling for the impact of fluid intelligence.
The sample in the current investigation consisted of 301 Polish adults (193 females, 108 males) with a mean age of 26.21 (SD = 7.31). To measure ability emotional intelligence we used The Test of Emotional Intelligence, referring to a well-known four-branch model of emotional intelligence by Salovey and Mayer. Fluid intelligence was assessed with Cattell’s Culture Fair Intelligence Test 3. The Centrality of Religiosity Scale was administered to measure the importance of religious constructs in five subdimensions, i.e., intellectual, ideological, experiential, public practice and private practice.
It was found that fluid intelligence was positively correlated with emotional intelligence and negatively related to the general score in the centrality of religiosity. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, revealed no significant relationship with any dimension of religiosity. Interestingly, when combined into a single regression model both fluid intelligence and emotional intelligence became significant predictors of religiosity. What is more, we found evidence for a reciprocal suppression between the two variables, since both predictors - when included together - increased their predictive influence on religiosity. Furthermore, we also conducted a relative weight analysis to test for the relative contribution of specific religiosity aspects to the level of explained variance in emotional and fluid intelligence. Whereas for emotional intelligence the largest share of variance was explained by public religious practice, for cognitive intelligence the ideological aspect of religiosity proved to be most important.
The current findings not only replicate previous results but also shed new light on the complex interplay between emotional intelligence, fluid intelligence, and religiosity. The presentation discusses the significance of the obtained results for future research on emotional abilities and religiosity.
