Claims about how “emotionally intelligent women” specifically respond to gaslighting circulate widely, but neither half of that premise holds up well against the research once it is examined directly. There is no study we are aware of that measured how emotional intelligence, specifically in women, predicts a specific reaction to gaslighting. What does exist is research on what gaslighting actually is, why the popular use of the word has drifted from that definition, and a separate, broader body of work on how measured emotional intelligence relates to handling conflict in general.
What gaslighting actually means, in the research that defined it
In a 2019 paper in American Sociological Review, the sociologist Paige Sweet argued that gaslighting is better understood as a sociological phenomenon than a purely psychological one. Her account defines it as a pattern of manipulation that depends on an existing structural or social power imbalance between two people, not simply one person disagreeing with another’s account of events. In Sweet’s analysis, gaslighting in intimate relationships often works specifically because it draws on gendered stereotypes, including the association of femininity with irrationality or emotional excess, to make a target doubt their own perception of reality.
This is one influential paper offering a particular theoretical account, not a large-scale empirical study measuring how often gaslighting occurs or how people respond to it. But the definition itself matters for evaluating the premise of “signs of gaslighting” content that circulates widely online: Sweet’s account describes a sustained pattern embedded in a power-laden relationship, not a single argument, a differing memory of an event, or an ordinary disagreement.
Sweet’s account also describes specific mechanisms rather than a single behaviour: perpetrators enlisting other people, family members, mutual friends, sometimes institutions, to corroborate a false version of events, and doing so repeatedly over time rather than in one incident. That detail is part of why she frames gaslighting as sociological rather than purely a two-person psychological dynamic. The manipulation, in her account, is reinforced by the wider social context the victim and perpetrator both operate within, not sustained by one person’s words alone.
Why the word rarely means that anymore in everyday use
That distinction has become harder to maintain in practice. Merriam-Webster named gaslighting its word of the year for 2022, citing a sharp rise in lookups driven partly by its expanding, looser usage. Psychologists who work directly with abuse survivors have raised a specific concern about this drift. In a 2024 article for Psychology Today, the psychologist Robin Stern, who has written extensively on gaslighting in clinical contexts, warned that applying the word to ordinary disagreements, forgetfulness, or simply holding a different opinion dilutes its meaning to the point that people who have experienced genuine, sustained reality manipulation struggle to be taken seriously when they use the same word to describe it.
This matters directly for a piece built around “signs of gaslighting,” because a checklist format tends to flatten the distinction Sweet’s research is built on. A specific behaviour, calmly restating one’s own account, declining to argue further, walking away, can look identical whether it is a response to genuine, sustained manipulation or simply a response to an ordinary disagreement that someone else has mislabelled using a word that has become newly fashionable.
What emotional intelligence research actually measures
Separately from the gaslighting literature, there is a substantial research base on emotional intelligence itself, most influentially the ability model developed by John Mayer, Peter Salovey, and David Caruso, which treats emotional intelligence as a measurable skill set involving perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions, rather than a fixed personality trait. Their model is typically assessed using the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, which scores responses to emotionally charged scenarios against expert consensus on effective handling.
A study using this framework, by Hester Xiao and colleagues, found that people who scored higher on measured emotional intelligence tended to favour what the researchers call high-engagement strategies, such as reappraising a situation or listening receptively, when trying to help regulate someone else’s emotions, and favoured low-engagement strategies, such as suppression or distraction, less often. This research concerns how emotionally intelligent people help regulate other people’s emotional states in general conflict and distress situations. It does not test responses to gaslighting specifically, and it does not isolate women as a distinct group with a different pattern from men.
Where the popular claim and the actual evidence diverge
Put plainly: there is a real, if narrow, research basis for saying people who score higher on measured emotional intelligence tend to favour more engaged, reappraisal-based approaches to emotionally difficult interactions in general. There is a separate, credible academic account of what gaslighting specifically is, and why it depends on a power imbalance rather than ordinary disagreement. There is no research we could locate that connects those two bodies of work into a specific, validated reaction pattern that “emotionally intelligent women” display when someone attempts to gaslight them.
That gap does not mean the underlying instinct behind the popular framing is baseless. Reappraisal and staying engaged rather than suppressing a reaction are genuinely supported responses to emotionally difficult situations in the broader emotion-regulation literature, and being difficult to talk out of one’s own well-founded perception of events is a reasonable description of resisting manipulation in the loose sense. But dressing that up as a specific, gendered checklist of behaviours validated by “emotional intelligence” research overstates what the cited science actually shows, and it risks doing exactly what Robin Stern warns against: treating a serious, structurally grounded pattern of abuse as interchangeable with any moment someone holds their ground in an argument.
The more defensible version of the claim is narrower and less shareable: people who manage emotionally charged conflict well, across the research on emotional intelligence generally, tend to stay engaged and reappraise rather than shut down or lash out, and recognising genuine gaslighting depends on identifying a sustained pattern tied to a real power imbalance, not any single tense exchange.
