Emotional Intelligence Tracks Strongly With Resilience in Spanish Workers, Study Finds

Employees who rate themselves highly on emotional intelligence also tend to describe themselves as resilient, according to a cross-sectional study of Spanish workers published in Frontiers in Psychology. The research, conducted by a team at Universidad CEU San Pablo in Madrid, found a strong positive association between perceived emotional intelligence and individual resilience in a sample of 103 employees drawn from 11 organizations spanning seven different sectors. The study used a cross-sectional observational design, meaning that all participants were surveyed at a single point in time rather than followed over months or years.

Each employee completed an online questionnaire that included the Spanish-adapted Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale, known as the WLEIS-S, together with the Resilience Scale-14, a brief instrument for measuring the capacity to recover from adversity. The questionnaire also collected sociodemographic and occupational information, allowing the researchers to test whether factors such as job characteristics or personal background tracked with resilience levels. The headline result was a correlation coefficient of .762 between perceived emotional intelligence and resilience, a relationship that was statistically significant at p < .001.

In practical terms, employees who perceived themselves as better at understanding and managing emotions were also much more likely to report that they could withstand and adapt to workplace stressors. A correlation of this size is considered strong in psychological research, although the study’s design means it cannot establish which construct, if either, drives the other. One of the more technically interesting findings concerns the four dimensions of perceived emotional intelligence measured by the WLEIS.

All four were positively and significantly associated with resilience, but the magnitudes differed considerably. The strongest association appeared for the use of emotion dimension, with a correlation of .785, indicating that the ability to harness one’s emotions in the service of performance was the facet most tightly linked to self-reported resilience in this sample. The weakest association, at .335, was found for appraisal of others’ emotion, the capacity to read and understand the feelings of people around oneself.

This pattern of differential associations is noteworthy because the four dimensions were not equally tied to resilience scores. The authors caution, however, that further research is needed to examine the relationship between the two constructs and their empirical distinctiveness, since perceived emotional intelligence and resilience may partly overlap as self-descriptions of psychological adaptation.

Perhaps surprisingly, the study found no significant associations between resilience and any of the sociodemographic or occupational variables it examined. Across a sample that spanned seven sectors of the Spanish economy, resilience scores did not differ reliably according to the background and job-related characteristics measured. Within this sample, individual differences in emotional self-perception were a more informative correlate of resilience than the demographic or occupational categories assessed.

The researchers are careful to frame their findings in associative rather than causal terms. Because the data were collected at one moment in time using self-report questionnaires, several alternative explanations remain open, and the results should not be read as evidence that training emotional intelligence would raise resilience. Within the framework of positive organizational psychology, resilience is treated as a psychological resource that helps employees maintain well-being and adapt to demands at work, and the study documents its close association with perceived emotional intelligence in a working population.

By documenting a strong link with perceived emotional intelligence across a deliberately varied, cross-sector sample, the research addresses a relationship that the authors note remains limited in its understanding among working populations. The conclusions stand as an invitation for further empirical work rather than a prescription for workplace practice.

Subject of Research: The association between perceived emotional intelligence and resilience among employees across sectors in Spain

Article Title: Perceived emotional intelligence and individual resilience in a cross-sector sample of employees

Article References: Martinez-Jurado, M., Egea-Romero, M. P., Saiz-Clar, E., Cima-Muñoz, A., & Rincon, E. (2026). Perceived emotional intelligence and individual resilience in a cross-sector sample of employees. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1901514. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1901514

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1901514

Keywords: emotional intelligence, resilience, employees, workplace psychology, cross-sectional study, positive organizational psychology, WLEIS-S, RS-14, Spain, self-report measures, occupational health, Perceived