Measuring perceived emotional intelligence in the adolescent population: Psychometric properties of the Trait Meta-Mood Scale

The Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS; Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, & Palfai, 1995) is a well-established measure of perceived emotional intelligence, an aspect of emotional intelligence that includes people’s beliefs and attitudes about their own emotional experience. Although the TMMS has been widely used in adult populations, until now no data have been reported on its validity in the adolescent population. In the present work we analyzed the psychometric properties of the TMMS in a sample of 1,497 adolescents aged 12 to 17. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis corroborated the 3-factor structure of the original scale (attention to feelings, clarity of feelings, and mood repair); moreover, these dimensions showed adequate reliability and correlated among themselves in the expected fashion. We also found evidence of discriminant validity with the Big Five personality factors and analyzed differences in the TMMS dimensions according to participants’ age and sex. We discuss both the implications of these results and the utility of this scale in research on the emotional intelligence construct.