Journal of Family Violence, Vol. 19, No. 5, October 2004 ( 2004) An Exploratory Study of Emotional Intelligence and Domestic Abuse Jason Winters, 1,2 Robert J. W. Clift, 1 and Donald G. Dutton1 To date, there is no literature specifically addressing the relationship between spousal battering and emotional intelligence, a concept that captures the success, or lack thereof, of a person's functioning in their immediate environment. Forty-four men convicted of spousal assault and 76 undergraduate students completed the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i; R. Bar-On, BarOn Emotional Quotient Inventory: User's Manual, Multi-Health Systems, Inc., Toronto, 1997), the Propensity for Abusiveness Scale (PAS; D. G. Dutton, J. Fam. Violence 10(2): 203-221, 1995), and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (D. Paulhus, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 46: 598-609, 1984; Assessing Self-Deception and Impression Management in Self-Reports: The Bal- anced Inventory of Desirable Responding, Unpublished manual, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 1988; In Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Attitudes, Aca- demic Press, San Diego, CA, pp. 17-59, 1991). Results of this exploratory study indicate that batterers score significantly lower than the general population on all components of EQ-i. Ad- ditionally EQ-i total and subscale scores for both samples correlate negatively and significantly with scores on PAS, suggesting that deficits in various components of emotional intelligence are related to an increase in the propensity to be abusive. Implications for batterer treatment are discussed. KEY WORDS: domestic violence; emotional intelligence; EQ-i; spousal abuse; propensity for abusiveness; treatment. Dutton (1995a) defines wife assault as "any physical act of aggression by a man against a woman with whom he is in an intimate (i.e., sexual-emotional) relationship" (p. 3). The literature on wife assault prevalence rates (e.g., Straus, 1979; Straus et al., 1980) has distinguished severe assault (e.g., hitting with a fist or an object and assault with a weapon) from nonsevere assault. Injuries sustained from severe assault typically require medical attention and in most jurisdictions assault must be severe to meet standards for arrest (Dutton, 1995a). This, however, is not meant to minimize the physical and psychological impact of all forms of domestic abuse. 1 Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 2To whom correspondence should be addressed at Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Van- couver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4; e-mail: jwinters@inter change.ubc.ca. Lifetime prevalence rates of wife assault in North America have been reported to be anywhere from 19 to 23% (Kennedy & Dutton, 1989; Schulman, 1979; Statistics Canada, 1993; Straus et al., 1980) and rates of severe wife assault have been documented as ranging from 5.4 to 11.3% (Kennedy & Dutton, 1989; Schulman, 1979; Straus et al., 1980). Given that in Canada and the United States there are 12,429,159 (Statistics Canada, 2000) and 102,773,000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001) woman aged 19 and older, respectively, it follows that 1,000,000 Canadian and 8,500,000 American women have been victims of se- vere wife assault. Given the high rates of wife assault, it is no surprise that there