“Intelligence and Interpersonal Sensitivity: A Meta-Analysis”, Nora A. Murphy, Judith A. Hall2011 ()⁠:

A meta-analytic review investigated the association between general intelligence and interpersonal sensitivity. The review involved k = 38 independent samples with 2,988 total participants. There was a highly statistically-significant small-to-medium effect for intelligence measures to be correlated with decoding accuracy (r = 0.19, p < 0.001).

Significant moderators included the type of decoding judgment (emotion vs. intended meaning judgments), decoding channel (audio-only vs. audio-plus-video channel), and target gender (both male-and-female targets vs. female-only targets).

Interpersonal decoding accuracy requires some level of social sophistication and results of this meta-analysis suggest that part of that social sophistication involves the cognitive abilities comprising general intelligence.

[Keywords: intelligence, interpersonal sensitivity, decoding, meta-analysis]