Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale (ESES)

1. Abstract

The Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale (ESES) is a prominent 32-item psychometric instrument developed by Beverley A. Kirk, Nicola S. Schutte, and Donald W. Hine (2008) to quantify an individual’s subjective confidence in functioning adaptively across emotional domains. Theoretically positioned at the intersection of Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory of self-efficacy and the four-branch ability model of emotional intelligence introduced by John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey, the ESES addresses a critical measurement gap. Rather than assessing objective cognitive capability (ability EI) or cross-situational behavioral dispositions (trait EI), the ESES captures domain-specific self-efficacy expectations regarding one’s capacity to perceive, understand, facilitate, and manage emotions in both the self and interpersonal environments.

Respondents evaluate each item using a 5-point Likert-type confidence continuum ranging from 1 (Not At All Confident) to 5 (Very Confident). Initial structural inquiries validated a robust, unidimensional higher-order construct with remarkable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = .96) and substantial temporal stability over a three-week interval (r = .85). Subsequent psychometric investigations, most notably by Lorraine Dacre Pool and Pamela Qualter (2012a), demonstrated that the 32 items reliably map onto a coherent four-factor framework: (1) Using and Managing Own Emotions, (2) Identifying and Understanding Own Emotions, (3) Dealing with Others’ Emotions, and (4) Perceiving Emotion through Facial Expression and Body Language. Extensive empirical investigations substantiate the scale’s construct, convergent, discriminant, and incremental predictive validity across occupational, clinical, and higher-education contexts, establishing the ESES as a premier metric for affective assessment and interventional outcome research.

2. Keywords

Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale, ESES, emotional self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, Bandura, Mayer-Salovey model, emotion regulation, psychometrics, affective assessment, construct validity, self-efficacy beliefs

3. Authors

The Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale was conceptualized and psychometrically validated by researchers based in the Department of Psychology at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia:

• Beverley A. Kirk, Ph.D. — School of Psychology, University of New England, Armidale, Australia. Primary investigator examining emotional competencies, psychological well-being, and expressive interventions in personal and workplace contexts.
• Nicola S. Schutte, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology, School of Psychology, University of New England, Armidale, Australia. Globally recognized authority on emotional intelligence measurement, positive psychology, and behavioral self-regulation.
• Donald W. Hine, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology, School of Psychology, University of New England, Armidale, Australia (subsequently affiliated with the University of Canterbury). Specialist in psychometric modeling, behavioral decision-making, and quantitative methodologies.

Subsequent multidimensional structural validation and adolescent adaptations were pioneered by Lorraine Dacre Pool (University of Central Lancashire, UK) and Pamela Qualter (University of Manchester, UK).

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale (ESES) is to measure an individual’s perceived competence and personal agency regarding adaptive emotional functioning. In psychological measurement, a persistent distinction exists between what individuals know or are capable of doing under standardized testing conditions (maximal cognitive performance or ability emotional intelligence) and what they routinely do across varying behavioral contexts (typical performance or trait emotional intelligence). The ESES operationalizes a critical third dimension: emotional self-efficacy—the self-referent conviction that one possesses the personal resources required to orchestrate effective cognitive, behavioral, and emotional responses when confronting emotionally charged events.

From an applied perspective, the ESES was engineered to serve multifaceted needs across psychological science:

• Occupational and Organizational Applications: In high-stress vocational environments, emotional self-efficacy governs how employees navigate interpersonal hostility, occupational burnout, and organizational change. Studies such as Kirk, Schutte, and Hine (2011) utilized the scale to demonstrate how expressive writing interventions enhance workplace emotional self-efficacy, subsequently attenuating perceived incivility and promoting positive affect.
• Clinical and Counseling Assessment: Deficits in emotional self-efficacy are linked to affective dysregulation, alexithymia, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety. Counselors utilize the instrument to establish baseline self-appraisals and track therapeutic progress across cognitive-behavioral and dialectical behavior therapies.
• Educational and Developmental Contexts: The transition to higher education or secondary schooling requires substantial emotional adaptation. Research by Dacre Pool and Qualter (2012b) documented that emotional self-efficacy can be systematically elevated through targeted educational interventions, fostering student retention, academic persistence, and psychological resilience.

By assessing confidence in handling both personal emotional turmoil and interpersonal affective demands, the ESES furnishes clinicians, educators, and organizational psychologists with a diagnostic benchmark to predict adaptive coping, subjective well-being, and social mastery.

5. Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct measured by the ESES is emotional self-efficacy (ESE). Defined strictly within social cognitive parameters, ESE is not an objective skill, nor is it a stable personality trait like neuroticism or extraversion. Instead, it constitutes a dynamic self-appraisal of competence regarding one’s operational agency across emotional domains. While Kirk et al. (2008) initially developed the instrument as a broad, overarching metric reflecting aggregate confidence, comprehensive structural evaluations by Dacre Pool and Qualter (2012a) established that the construct comprises four interrelated yet distinct operational dimensions:

1. Using and Managing Own Emotions

This dimension assesses the individual’s confidence in deliberately deploying affective states to optimize cognitive processing, problem-solving, and goal directedness, as well as the agency required to down-regulate detrimental negative affect. It encompasses self-regulatory mastery under acute psychological distress. Illustrative items include: “Use positive emotions to generate novel solutions to old problems” (Item 6), “Regulate your own emotions when under pressure” (Item 12), and “Calm down when feeling angry” (Item 20). High scores reflect robust beliefs in emotional recovery and mood-facilitated creativity.

2. Identifying and Understanding Own Emotions

This subconstruct reflects an individual’s perceived capability to accurately recognize, differentiate, and understand the internal origins and developmental trajectory of their own feeling states. It represents the self-efficacy analog of introspective emotional literacy. Representative items include: “Correctly identify your own negative emotions” (Item 1), “Know what causes you to feel a positive emotion” (Item 4), and “Understand what causes your emotions to change” (Item 19). Individuals with high confidence in this domain do not experience their emotional shifts as chaotic or uninterpretable.

3. Dealing with Others’ Emotions

This interpersonal dimension targets self-efficacy regarding social emotional competence—specifically, the perceived capability to intervene constructively in the affective states of others, provide emotional solace, and assist peers in cognitive reappraisal. Core items include: “Help another person change a negative emotion to a positive emotion” (Item 2), “Help another person to regulate emotions when under pressure” (Item 16), and “Help another person regulate emotions after he or she has suffered a loss” (Item 32). This factor underpins empathetic responsiveness and relational leadership.

4. Perceiving Emotion Through Facial Expression and Body Language

This somatic and non-verbal perceptual dimension encapsulates confidence in decoding communicative non-verbal cues displayed by both self and interaction partners. It integrates facial affect recognition and bodily kinesthetic awareness. Defining items include: “Notice the emotion your body language is portraying” (Item 17), “Notice the emotion another person’s body language is portraying” (Item 21), and “Recognize what emotion another person is communicating through his or her facial expression” (Item 29).

6. Theoretical Framework

The architectural foundation of the Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale synthesizes two influential theoretical paradigms in contemporary psychology:

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory

Central to Albert Bandura’s (1977, 1997) social cognitive theory is the proposition that human functioning is guided by self-efficacy beliefs—subjective evaluations of one’s capability to execute courses of action required to manage prospective situations. Bandura distinguished between outcome expectations (the belief that a given behavior will yield a specific outcome) and efficacy expectations (the belief that one can successfully execute the behavior). Self-efficacy beliefs regulate human functioning through cognitive, motivational, affective, and decisional processes. In the emotional sphere, individuals who harbor strong emotional self-efficacy view emotional distress not as an uncontrollable catastrophic event, but as a manageable state amenable to regulation. Consequently, they mobilize constructive coping mechanisms, persist longer in challenging interpersonal exchanges, and exhibit diminished autonomic vulnerability to psychological strain.

The Mayer-Salovey Four-Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence

To establish comprehensive content coverage across emotional processing, Kirk and colleagues aligned their item pool directly with the hierarchical ability framework formulated by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer (1997). This foundational model categorizes emotional abilities into four escalating branches:

1. Perception of Emotion: The ability to recognize emotions in oneself, others, and environmental stimuli.
2. Emotional Facilitation of Thought: The capacity to generate, harness, and feel emotions as necessary to facilitate cognitive activities such as reasoning and creative problem-solving.
3. Understanding Emotions: The ability to comprehend emotional language, structural transitions between emotions, and underlying psychological antecedents.
4. Managing Emotions: The ability to be open to feelings, monitor them reflectively, and modulate affective intensity in self and others to promote personal and social growth.

Rather than assessing these four branches through performance tests requiring objective correct answers (such as the MSCEIT), the ESES reframes each branch through the psychometric lens of Bandurian confidence ratings. This structural synthesis provides a nuanced measurement system evaluating perceived operational mastery across the entire emotional spectrum.

7. Validity

The psychometric integrity of the ESES has been confirmed through multiple validation studies assessing construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related parameters:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Kirk et al. (2008) verified that ESES scores correlate positively and significantly with established measures of trait emotional intelligence, such as the Assessing Emotions Scale (Schutte et al., 1998; r = .68, p < .001). Furthermore, the ESES demonstrated moderate-to-strong positive correlations with generalized self-efficacy assessed via the General Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995; r = .51, p < .001), corroborating that while the scale assesses domain-specific efficacy, it shares theoretical variance with generalized agency. Moderate correlations with positive affect (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; r = .40) and life satisfaction (Satisfaction with Life Scale; r = .38) provide further evidence of convergent validity.

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, the ESES remains empirically distinguishable from broad personality traits and cognitive ability. Kirk et al. (2008) established that while the ESES correlates inversely with Neuroticism (r = -.36) and positively with Extraversion (r = .38), Conscientiousness (r = .32), and Agreeableness (r = .28) on the Big Five Inventory, the magnitude of these correlations confirms that the ESES cannot be reduced to simple personality variance. In hierarchical regression analyses, the ESES accounted for significant unique variance in psychological functioning over and above the Big Five domains. Additionally, the ESES exhibits non-significant to negligible correlations with verbal and non-verbal cognitive intelligence, establishing divergence from standard mental aptitudes.

Predictive and Interventional Criterion Validity

The scale possesses demonstrated utility in tracking clinical and interventional shifts. Kirk, Schutte, and Hine (2011) investigated the impact of a randomized expressive-writing intervention in a corporate workforce; participants assigned to expressively write about emotional challenges registered statistically significant post-test increases on the ESES, which subsequently predicted decreases in reported workplace incivility and increases in organizational engagement. Similarly, Dacre Pool and Qualter (2012b) reported significant pre-to-post gains on the ESES following an 11-week emotional competence curriculum in undergraduate cohorts, demonstrating the instrument’s sensitivity to interventional change.

8. Reliability

The Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency and stability across diverse cultural and demographic populations:

Internal Consistency

In the scale development investigation conducted by Kirk, Schutte, and Hine (2008) with an initial normative sample of 188 adults, the full 32-item ESES exhibited a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = .96. This elevated reliability indicates high item homogeneity without excessive redundancy. In follow-up cross-validation cohorts, full-scale alpha coefficients have consistently replicated between .92 and .96.

When evaluated according to the four-factor multidimensional structure identified by Dacre Pool and Qualter (2012a), individual subscales consistently exceed established psychometric criteria:

• Using and Managing Own Emotions: α = .89 to .91
• Identifying and Understanding Own Emotions: α = .84 to .87
• Dealing with Others’ Emotions: α = .87 to .89
• Perceiving Emotion Through Non-Verbal Cues: α = .79 to .82

Temporal Stability

Test-retest reliability was originally evaluated across a three-week interval among a sub-sample of university undergraduates. The test-retest correlation coefficient was r = .85 (p < .001), indicating high temporal stability while retaining sufficient dynamic sensitivity to detect genuine changes resulting from targeted emotional interventions.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the ESES has been systematically investigated through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA):

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the primary validation study by Kirk et al. (2008), principal components analysis (PCA) accompanied by scree tests and Horn’s parallel analysis initially supported a strong, dominant general factor accounting for approximately 43.8% of the total scale variance. While smaller secondary factors emerged, initial eigenvalues dropped markedly from Factor 1 (14.02) to Factor 2 (1.83), Factor 3 (1.52), and Factor 4 (1.28). This precipitous drop led the original authors to treat the instrument as a predominantly unidimensional measure in preliminary research.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Recognizing the theoretical complexity of the underlying Mayer-Salovey framework, Dacre Pool and Qualter (2012a) conducted a comprehensive CFA study involving a heterogeneous British cohort (N = 558). They formally evaluated competing structural models, comparing the original unidimensional model against alternative hierarchical and multi-factor structures. The empirically preferred model was an oblique four-factor structure reflecting:

• Factor 1: Using and Managing Own Emotions (Items: 3, 6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 30)
• Factor 2: Identifying and Understanding Own Emotions (Items: 1, 4, 9, 11, 19, 25, 27)
• Factor 3: Dealing with Others’ Emotions (Items: 2, 5, 7, 10, 13, 15, 16, 23, 24, 31, 32)
• Factor 4: Perceiving Emotion through Facial Expression and Body Language (Items: 17, 21, 29)

Goodness-of-fit indices demonstrated superior parameter estimates for this 4-factor correlated solution: χ²/df = 2.12, CFI = .92, TLI = .91, RMSEA = .054 (90% CI [.050, .058]), and SRMR = .048. All item factor loadings were statistically significant (p < .001), ranging from .51 to .81, confirming that the ESES functions effectively both as a global assessment of emotional self-efficacy and as a multidimensional diagnostic battery.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale (ESES)
• Authors: Beverley A. Kirk, Nicola S. Schutte, and Donald W. Hine
• Original Publication: 2008
• Target Population: Adults (aged 18 and older); an adapted adolescent version (ESES-A) exists for ages 11–16 (Qualter et al., 2014)
• Administration Format: Self-report paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire
• Estimated Completion Time: 5 to 10 minutes
• Total Item Count: 32 items
• Response Continuum: 5-point Likert-type scale formatted as:
  • 1 = Not At All Confident
  • 2 = A Little Confident
  • 3 = Moderately Confident
  • 4 = Quite Confident
  • 5 = Very Confident
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Global Score: Calculated by summing all 32 items (theoretical range: 32 to 160) or computing the mean across all items (range: 1.0 to 5.0). There are no reverse-scored items.
  • Subscale Scores (Dacre Pool & Qualter, 2012a): Computed by summing or averaging items corresponding to the four established factors:
    • Using and Managing Own Emotions: Items 3, 6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 30 (11 items; range: 11–55).
    • Identifying and Understanding Own Emotions: Items 1, 4, 9, 11, 19, 25, 27 (7 items; range: 7–35).
    • Dealing with Others’ Emotions: Items 2, 5, 7, 10, 13, 15, 16, 23, 24, 31, 32 (11 items; range: 11–55).
    • Perceiving Non-Verbal Emotions: Items 17, 21, 29 (3 items; range: 3–15).
  • Interpretation: Higher scores reflect greater self-efficacy expectations regarding adaptive emotional functioning, predicting greater psychological resilience, active coping strategies, and lower vulnerability to affective distress.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale was initially published in 2008 in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Individual Differences. The scale was established as an open academic assessment tool intended to foster research in emotional competencies and social cognitive functioning.

Licensing and Fee Structure: The ESES is accessible free of charge for non-commercial academic, research, and instructional purposes. Formal purchase or licensing fees are not required for scholarly investigation, provided that appropriate bibliographic acknowledgment is accorded to the original authors (Kirk, Schutte, & Hine, 2008). For commercial deployment, organizational training packages, or integration within proprietary digital health software, prospective users must secure explicit authorization from the primary authors or the copyright holding publisher (Elsevier Ltd.).

12. References

• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman and Company.
• Dacre Pool, L., & Qualter, P. (2012a). The dimensional structure of the Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale (ESES). Australian Journal of Psychology, 64(3), 147–154. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1742-9536.2011.00039.x
• Dacre Pool, L., & Qualter, P. (2012b). Improving emotional intelligence and emotional self-efficacy through a teaching intervention for university students. Learning and Individual Differences, 22(3), 306–312. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2012.01.010
• Kirk, B. A., Schutte, N. S., & Hine, D. W. (2008). Development and preliminary validation of an emotional self-efficacy scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(5), 432–436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2008.05.018
• Kirk, B. A., Schutte, N. S., & Hine, D. W. (2011). The effect of an expressive-writing intervention for employees on emotional self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, affect, and workplace incivility. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41(1), 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00708.x
• Kirk, B. A., Schutte, N. S., & Hine, D. W. (2013). Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale. In C. A. Simmons & P. Lehmann (Eds.), Tools for strengths-based assessment and evaluation (pp. 306–308). Springer Publishing Company.
• Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence? In P. Salovey & D. J. Sluyter (Eds.), Emotional development and emotional intelligence: Educational implications (pp. 3–34). Basic Books.
• Qualter, P., Dacre Pool, L., Gardner, K. J., Ashley-Kot, S., Wise, A., & Wols, A. (2015). The Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale: Adaptation and validation for young adolescents. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 33(1), 33–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734282914540452
• Schutte, N. S., Malouff, J. M., Hall, L. E., Haggerty, D. J., Cooper, J. T., Golden, C. J., & Dornheim, L. (1998). Development and validation of a measure of emotional intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 25(2), 167–177. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(98)00001-4
• Schwarzer, R., & Jerusalem, M. (1995). Generalized Self-Efficacy scale. In J. Weinman, S. Wright, & M. Johnston (Eds.), Measures in health psychology: A user’s portfolio. Causal and control beliefs (pp. 35–37). NFER-NELSON.

13. Items of the Scale