Emotional intelligence and reactivity

• The research reflection for the week focused on two tasks related to emotion: an emotional intelligence questionnaire and an emotional reactivity task.

Emotional Intelligence

• Emotional intelligence involves the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own and others' emotions.
• This includes awareness of emotional states, the ability to label emotions, understand their causes, and distinguish feelings, as well as the management and regulation of emotions.
• It's theorized that individuals with higher emotional intelligence should exhibit more regulated reactions to emotional events, demonstrating less affective volatility and quicker recovery from negative emotions.
• The Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (short form with 30 items) was used to assess emotional intelligence.
• The questionnaire included items like "Many times I can't figure out what emotion I'm feeling" and "I usually find it difficult to regulate my emotions" (reverse coded), as well as "I'm normally able to get into someone's shoes and experience their emotions" (positively coded).
• Reverse coding is applied to items to ensure that higher scores consistently indicate higher emotional intelligence.

Facial Feedback Hypothesis

• Participants undertook a task replicating an experiment related to the facial feedback hypothesis, which posits that making affective facial expressions can induce corresponding emotions.
• The task involved holding a pen in the mouth in one of two ways: either with the teeth (inducing a smile-like expression) or with the lips (without engaging the teeth).
• According to original findings, holding the pen in the teeth was expected to induce more positive emotions and result in more positive ratings of stimuli.
• The original findings on the facial feedback hypothesis have faced challenges in replication.
• Facial movements in response to others' emotions, even subtle ones, could facilitate a better understanding of their emotions.
• Participants viewed either a photograph with instructions to hold a pen in their teeth, or a photo with instructions to hold the pen with their lips.
• The images used in the study were randomly assigned.

Study Design

• Original facial feedback hypothesis studies were conducted face-to-face, which may have introduced experimenter bias, unlike current online studies.
• Researchers may have subtly altered their behavior based on the condition they were assigning participants to, influencing the results.
• Participants reported the pen task as annoying and weird, unsure of its purpose.
• This stands in contrast to how aware experimenters were of the purpose
• Sentiment analysis using Vadar in Python, a tool trained on social media comments, was used to analyze the emotional content of participants' responses.
• Most words used in participants' responses were neutral (80-85%), with a small proportion being negative (around 5%) and a larger proportion being positive (12-18%).
• Overall, the sentiment expressed in the comments was more positive than negative.
• Participants' ratings of the study showed general enjoyment and conscientiousness.

Results

• People were more likely to not think the results would replicate the main study.
• The average value of enjoyment for the task was around 60%.
• The results showed no statistically significant mood change across instruction types (smile vs. not smile).
• The ratings did not differ across the emotion conditions.
• The photos that were seen and rated were considered mildly positive by different people.
• Participants saw a random selection of six out of 12 possible photos
• The average value of rating positivity was negligibly different.
• Ratings from the photos did not demonstrate any statistical significance.
• Trait emotional intelligence was measured using a 30-item measure, dividing into five subscales: emotionality, well-being, self-control, social cognition, and adaptability.
• University students had relatively high emotional intelligence scores, with well-being being the highest-rated scale.
• There is a debate in the literature about measuring emotional intelligence accurately.
• A statistically significant but weak negative correlation was detected between emotional intelligence and emotion change scores.
• People who scored higher on emotional intelligence tended to have a reduced amount of negative effect.
• Another correlation was identified with negative direction, showing that people experience more negativity when emotional intelligence is low.

Exploration of emotional intelligence through questionnaires and reactivity tasks. The Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (short form) assesses the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions. Higher emotional intelligence correlates with regulated reactions and quick recovery from negative emotions.