The line sounds like a compliment and works like a definition. Emotionally intelligent people stay grounded, which quietly means that anyone who is grounded must be emotionally intelligent, and anyone who is not has some work to do. It treats a skill as a character.
Two studies are worth putting side by side here, because between them they take the saying apart in an unusually useful way. One found that people are close to blind about how much of this skill they have. The other found that the skill does not, on its own, make anybody behave any better.
You are a poor judge of your own
Marc Brackett, Susan Rivers, Sara Shiffman, Nicole Lerner and Peter Salovey ran three studies comparing two ways of measuring emotional intelligence: a performance test where answers are scored against experts, and a self-rating scale where you say how good you are.
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Across roughly 280 participants, the two barely agreed. Self-ratings correlated with tested ability at .19 for women and .27 for men. When participants were asked to estimate how they would score, and then asked again immediately after sitting the test, those guesses correlated with their actual results at .10 and .03, neither of them statistically significant. They had just taken the test and still could not say how it had gone.
Nearly 80% expected to land above the median. The bottom two quartiles overestimated themselves and the top two underestimated, which is a familiar enough pattern.
The detail that makes this more than a curiosity is what the same people did with a different ability. Asked to rate their verbal intelligence, their self-assessments tracked their verbal SAT scores at .43 and .53. In one sitting, the same participants were reasonably calibrated about their vocabulary and almost uncalibrated about their emotions.
The authors’ explanation for the gap is deflating and hard to argue with. Schools grade reading and mathematics. Teachers, employers and examiners hand back results. Almost nobody, ever, tells you how you are doing at reading a room or managing your own reaction. Without feedback there is nothing for a self-estimate to calibrate against, so what you are reporting when you rate your emotional intelligence is mostly your self-image.
And the skill does not point anywhere
The second study is blunter. Stéphane Côté, Katherine DeCelles, Julie McCarthy, Gerben Van Kleef and Ivona Hideg measured emotion-regulation knowledge, the part of emotional intelligence that covers knowing which strategy will actually work on a feeling in a given situation, and then looked at what people did.
Among 252 university employees, averaging sixteen years of work experience, emotion-regulation knowledge had essentially no relationship with harming colleagues. The correlation was minus .04. Nothing.
What it did was multiply. Among the employees who had a lot of emotion-regulation knowledge, Machiavellianism, the trait of wanting to manipulate people for personal gain, strongly predicted interpersonal deviance, things like publicly embarrassing a colleague at work. Among the employees who had little of that knowledge, Machiavellianism barely predicted deviance at all. The trait needed the skill to become behavior.
In a separate study of 131 students playing a social dilemma with a real cash prize on the line, the same structure ran the other way. Among students high in emotion-regulation knowledge, a strong moral identity predicted leaving more in the common pool for everyone else. Among students low in it, moral identity predicted nothing in particular. Wanting to be good, by itself, did not get anyone there.
The researchers checked whether general cognitive ability produced the same pattern, and whether the other three branches of emotional intelligence did. None of them did. It was specific to knowing how to work on emotions.
One thing must be said clearly, because the finding is easy to garble. Emotion-regulation knowledge was positively correlated with moral identity and negatively correlated with Machiavellianism. On average, people who are good at this are somewhat less manipulative, not more. The authors’ point is narrower and sharper: the overlap is small, plenty of manipulative people also have the skill, and those are the ones who do real damage with it.
What the evidence will and will not carry
Both papers are correlational, and neither can establish cause. The emotion-regulation measures had low reliability, an alpha of .61, which the authors flag and which would have made their results harder rather than easier to find. The workplace deviance was self-reported, which the authors defend on several grounds, including that self-reports of this kind correlate about .48 with supervisors’ accounts, but it remains self-reported.
The Brackett findings come with a real puzzle attached. In the second and third studies, tested emotional intelligence predicted social competence only for men, including in a live conversation with a stranger rated by observers. The authors offer four possible explanations and say plainly that they do not know which is right. Only one test of each type was used, so the gap between them may not generalize past those instruments. And both of these papers lean on the same performance test, the MSCEIT, which means they are less independent of each other than their separate authorship suggests.
Where this leaves the saying
Put the two findings together and the original claim turns inside out. Emotional skill does not supply groundedness, because it is an amplifier: it carries whatever the person is already aimed at further and more effectively than it would otherwise go. And it does not announce itself from the inside, because the one domain where we get almost no external feedback is this one.
So the interesting questions are not the ones the saying invites. Not whether you have it, since your answer to that carries little information. The questions the evidence actually points at are what you are pointed at, which decides what the skill will be used for, and who in your life would tell you if you had it wrong, since nothing else is going to.
That is a less flattering picture than the compliment, and a more useful one. Being grounded, on this evidence, is not a byproduct of being good with feelings. It is a separate matter, and it comes from outside.