Abstract

This Research has been performed to gather the reliability and validity related evidences of the Trait MetaMood Scale(Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, & Palfai, 1995) developed to assess an individual's emotional intelligence. At first, the factor structure of the TMMS showed there were statistically significant three factors as Salovey et al(1995) reported based on a university sample in the U.S.; clarity of the awareness of one's mood, attention to one's mood, and mood repair. The reliability indices based on these three dimensions were fairly good as those of psychological attitude measures. In order to investigate the criterion-related validity indices, the scores from the subscales of the TMMS were correlated with those of measures assessing associated constructs; MAS(Swinkles & Guiliano, 1995), NMR(Catanzaro & Mearns, 1990), EES (Kring, Smith, & Neale, 1994), AEQ(King & Emmons, 1990). These results indicated good convergent as well as discriminant validity evidences. All the scores from subscales of these measures were correlated to the alexithymia score to examine the predictive validity of the TMMS subscales. The regression analysis and the discriminant analysis presented the clarity dimension of the TMMS and mood awareness scale of the MAS, measuring same construct, and the attention scale of the TMMS and the mood monitoring score from the MAS, also assessing same concept, were the most effective predicting the amount of an individual's alexithymic symptoms. Additionally, the first factor of the ambivalence over emotional expressiveness scale was also shown to be useful to discriminate alexithymics among responders. All these results imply the sub-scales of the TMMS measuring emotional intelligence have good psychometric properties.