A large international dataset suggests that something changed in the way adults described their emotional resources after 2019. Across 28,000 records from 166 countries, the average emotional-intelligence score was 5.79 per cent lower in 2024 than it had been in 2019. Every one of the eight competencies in the assessment moved down.

The largest declines were not in empathy or recognising feelings. They were in optimism, intrinsic motivation and what the researchers call pursuing noble goals: connecting everyday choices to a wider sense of purpose.

The authors of the peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Psychology call the pattern an “emotional recession.” That is a memorable description. It is not a clinical diagnosis, and the evidence is more specific than a claim that humanity as a whole has become less emotionally intelligent.

One distinction matters immediately. “Tracked” is convenient shorthand for the years covered, but the researchers did not follow the same 28,000 adults from 2019 to 2024. They compared annual averages from different people who took the assessment. The result is a repeated cross-sectional trend, not a record of every participant declining over time.

What this version of emotional intelligence measures

The study used the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment, or SEI. It is a 77-item self-report questionnaire used in coaching, education, leadership and organisational-development settings. The organisation’s technical manual describes a model built around eight competencies.

In plain language, they are identifying emotions accurately, spotting recurring reactions, considering the consequences of choices, working constructively with emotions, drawing motivation from personal values, taking a hopeful and proactive view, responding to other people’s feelings, and linking daily decisions to a larger purpose.

Participants rated statements about their own patterns on a five-point scale. The assessment did not observe them resolving an argument, responding to a distressed colleague or identifying emotion from a face. It measured how people perceived their capacities.

That boundary is important because emotional intelligence is not a single, universally agreed quantity. A systematic review of emotional-intelligence measures identified 40 instruments spanning ability, trait and mixed models. Two tests can use the same broad label while asking rather different questions.

Every competency moved in the same direction

Between 2019 and 2024, the average score for emotional literacy fell by 2.3 points. Recognising patterns fell by 2.2, consequential thinking by 1.6, navigating emotions by 2.0, intrinsic motivation by 3.0, optimism by 3.0, empathy by 1.6 and pursuing noble goals by 2.6.

All eight differences were statistically significant. Their standardised effect sizes ranged from 0.13 to 0.23, while the overall change had a Cohen’s d of 0.22. Those are small to modest effects, not evidence of a collapse in each person.

The combination of breadth and size is what makes the result interesting. A large sample can reveal a gentle shift that would disappear into the noise of a small survey. If many people each move a little, the social consequences may still be meaningful. At the same time, a precise estimate is not automatically a large one.

The researchers also reported declines in four self-rated outcomes: relationships, effectiveness, wellbeing and quality of life. People with higher emotional-intelligence scores were more likely to report strong outcomes. Because the skills and outcomes came from the same questionnaire, however, that association cannot show that one caused the other.

The steepest drop was in the ability to face forward

Optimism, intrinsic motivation and pursuing noble goals make up the SEI’s “Drive” strand. Those capacities fell by roughly seven to eight per cent, compared with about four to six per cent for the model’s other strands.

Here, optimism does not mean insisting that everything will be fine. The questionnaire defines it as taking a proactive perspective of hope and possibility. Intrinsic motivation means drawing energy from personal values and commitments rather than relying entirely on external rewards. Pursuing noble goals means connecting ordinary decisions to an overarching sense of purpose.

Those definitions point to a loss of forward pull. People in the later samples were somewhat less likely to say they could see possibility, sustain effort from within and place today’s actions inside a meaningful longer story.

It would be unfair to translate that into laziness, weakness or a bad attitude. A person may find optimism harder because their material circumstances have become harder. Purpose can recede when caring duties, insecure work, poor health or financial pressure compress life into the next urgent task. Emotional capacity belongs to a person, but it is exercised inside conditions that can either support it or drain it.

There is also a difference between emotional skill and permanent calm. As our earlier look at people who appear easy to talk to but remain personally unseen explored, smooth social functioning can sometimes conceal self-silencing. Managing emotion well should include noticing a real limit, not merely presenting a pleasant surface.

The pandemic fits the timing, but the study cannot name the cause

The years make the pandemic impossible to ignore. The downward movement was concentrated in the earlier part of the 2019 to 2024 period, and the later averages looked more like a plateau than an accelerating fall.

That pattern is compatible with prolonged uncertainty, disrupted relationships and changes in work. It does not prove that any one of them caused the lower scores. The study did not randomly expose people to pandemic stress, measure the same individuals before and after it, or isolate remote work, social media, inflation and other possible explanations.

The research therefore identifies a time trend inside one assessment database. “Emotional recession” is the authors’ framework for interpreting it. Recession is a metaphor here, not a settled psychological category with a universally accepted diagnostic threshold.

This is also why the plateau matters. The paper supports the idea of a sustained gap from the 2019 level more clearly than it supports a claim of uninterrupted annual deterioration. Those are different stories, and the second would be more alarming than the evidence allows.

Worldwide reach does not make a worldwide census

The 28,000 records were selected from a larger database of 276,972 assessment takers. Researchers balanced the analytical sample across seven global regions, adults above and below 40, and male and female respondents. This deliberate stratification makes comparisons less vulnerable to a later year simply containing more people from one large region or age group.

But it does not make the sample representative of all adults in 166 countries. Participants took the SEI in applied settings such as training, coaching and organisational development. The paper says professionals in leadership, learning and human development, along with people in postsecondary education, were overrepresented.

The authors also acknowledge the limits of self-reporting, including response style and incomplete self-awareness. Two of the eight competency scales had internal-consistency estimates of 0.64 and 0.65, slightly below the conventional 0.70 benchmark. The minimum change the instrument can reliably detect for one person has not been established.

The raw data are proprietary and not publicly available. All four authors were employed by Six Seconds, the organisation that publishes the assessment. They disclosed that relationship and said no other commercial or financial ties influenced the research. Employment does not invalidate a result, but it is relevant context when an organisation studies its own tool and gives the resulting pattern a distinctive public name.

The result is a warning, not a verdict on people

The careful conclusion is narrower than “the world has lost six per cent of its emotional intelligence.” Within a large, geographically broad but non-representative database, adults assessed in 2024 rated a set of emotional capacities lower than comparable adults assessed in 2019. The movement appeared in all eight measures, while its average standardised size was modest.

Nor do lower averages have to be permanent. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of emotional-intelligence training in healthcare workers found improvements following training, although the studies varied and long-term evidence was more limited. An earlier systematic review of emotional-intelligence interventions reached a similarly cautious conclusion: emotional competencies can be developed, but the field needs stronger designs and clearer agreement about what is being trained.

Practice is only part of the answer. Naming feelings, recognising a recurring response and pausing before a consequential choice may create more room to act. Yet optimism cannot be ordered into existence, and purpose is difficult to sustain inside institutions that make people feel disposable. Emotional resources and living conditions continually shape one another.

The deepest value of this study may be the question raised by its three steepest declines. What changed when people became less able to see possibility, draw energy from their own commitments and connect the present to a meaningful future?

The data cannot answer that question on their own. They do suggest it deserves more than a cheerful instruction to be resilient. If hope has weakened, rebuilding it means both practising emotional skills and creating relationships, workplaces and communities in which hope has something real to attach itself to.