Sex differences of relations between dark triad of personality and emotional intelligence

The Dark Triad (DT) traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy have weak relations with general mental ability and describe malfunctioning interpersonal relationship. The interpersonal relationships based on socio-emotional intelligence include communication competence, social intelligence and emotional intelligence (EI). DT traits have unclear links with features of emotional intelligence: low affect and cognitive empathy, inadequacy of recognizing emotional conditions and responding to them correctly. Recent studies provide data on stable sex differences only in the degree of variance of self-report EI and DT. Thus, our study was aimed at testing the hypotheses about correlation between DT and selfreport EI by gender. A sample of 244 students aged 18-30 from different universities of Perm (54 % female) completed Russian translation of the Short-Dark Triad and Questionnaire of Emotional Intelligence. The hypothesis was tested using bivariate zero-order Pearson correlation, t-test and Cohen’s d. We have found statistically significant differences for Machiavellianism (d = 0,30), psychopathy (d = 0,73) and control of emotional [removed]d = 0,70) in the male group. Significant relations between self-report EI and DT were observed for narcissism and psychopathy. In the male sample, correlations of narcissism were in the range of 0,20 to 0,27, where it was related to managing emotions. In the female group, we found many correlations in the range of 0.18 to 0,39 with all components of self-report EI (except for control of emotional expression). Psychopathy of men showed significantly negative relationship with intrapersonal EI in both groups (for male from -0,22 to -0,29; for female from -0,19 to -0,22). In general, narcissism is the «brightest» feature of personality for socio-emotional efficiency while psychopathy is the «darkest» trait. Sex differences were observed in male narcissism which was associated with the pragmatic side of EI: managing emotions of other people and emotional self-regulation. However, all received relations were weak. «Dark» personality can be considered as a factor of social and emotional efficiency in interpersonal relationships.