Emotional intelligence: A promise unfulfilled?

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a relatively new construct in differential psychology. Proponents of EI have made strong claims for its importance in basic and applied psychology. This article considers whether the promise of EI has been fulfilled. We examine various fundamental challenges to establishing EI as a major individual differences factor, including cross‐cultural issues. We then examine strategies for assessing EI as a personal quality distinct from general intelligence and personality, and evaluate leading tests and scales for EI. Various sources of validity evidence demonstrate the value of research on EI, but we also identify various weaknesses of existing instruments. It appears that there is no strong, over‐arching general factor of EI that shapes human emotional functioning across a range of diverse contexts. Instead, we advocate a “multipolar” conception of EI that discriminates temperament, information‐processing, emotion‐regulation and acquired skills. Focusing research on more narrowly defined but conceptually coherent research domains may be a more productive strategy than seeking to define an all‐embracing general EI.     

Emotional relief for parents: Is rational-emotive parent education effective?

The effects of a rational-emotive parent education program were studied on forty-eight parents from a nonclinical population using a pre-test, post-test control group design. The RET parenting program included four components: a) reducing emotional stress through disputing irrational beliefs, b) implementing rational discipline methods, c) rational problem solving skills and d) fostering rational thinking traits in their child. Four dependent variables were studied: parent irrationality, parent emotionality, parent perceptions of child problems and the perception of participants' parenting by their spouses. Results showed that for experimental group subjects there was a statistically significant reduction in parent irrationality, parent guilt and parent anger. An exploratory ten month follow-up suggested maintenance of effects, a reduction in perceived child behavior problems, and changes in parental irrational beliefs regarding self worth.     

Is Everything A World?

This paper discusses “inclusionism” in the context of David Lewis’s modal realism (and in the context of parasitic accounts of modality such as\ John Divers’s agnosticism about possible worlds). This is the doctrine that everything is a world. I argue that this doctrine would be beneficial to Divers-style agnosticism; that it suggests a reconfiguration of the concept of actuality in modal realism; and finally that it suffers from an as-yet unsolved difficulty, the problem of the unmarried husbands. This problem also shows that Stephen Yablo’s analysis of “intrinsic” is inadequate. Thanks to Philip Bricker, Ross Cameron, Daniel Nolan, John Divers, Kit Fine, Kris McDaniel, Augustin Rayo, Steve Yablo, to participants in the Arche modality seminar, University of St Andrews, and to the delegates of the APA Pacific Division Conference 2005.     

Anxiety and Attention: Is There an Attentional Bias for Positive Emotional Stimuli?

Empirical research has shown that anxiety is associated with a systematic bias in the cognitive system. Anxious individuals (clinically anxious patients and normal individuals with high-trait anxiety) are characterized by a pattern of selective processing that favors the encoding of threatening information. Is this attentional bias specific to threat-related information, or does it operate for positive emotional stimuli? The research directly connected with the existence of an attentional bias for threat in anxiety was examined.     

An Evaluation of Construct Validity: What Is This Thing Called Emotional Intelligence?

This article presents a meta-analytic review of the Emotional Intellpigence (EI) construct. The first portion of the study examines the relation between EI measures based on two differing models of the construct (i.e., mixed and ability). This study then examines the relation of each of the models separately with cognitive ability and the Big Five personality factors. Results indicate that measures based on the mixed model of EI overlap extensively (i.e., correlate .71 among themselves; k = 12, N = 3,259), whereas mixed measures and ability measures are relatively distinct (.14; k = 13, N = 2,442). Mixed model measures of EI exhibited greater overlap with personality- than ability-based EI measures. Conversely, ability-based EI measures demonstrated a higher correlation with cognitive ability than mixed measures (.34 vs. .13). Implications and suggestions for the measurement of EI are provided.     

What Is Neurophilosophy? A Methodological Account

The term ``neurophilosophy' is often used either implicitly or explicitly for characterizing the investigation of philosophical theories in relation to neuroscientific hypotheses. The exact methodological principles and systematic rules for a linkage between philosophical theories and neuroscientific hypothesis, however, remain to be clarified. The present contribution focuses on these principles, as well as on the relation between ontology and epistemology and the characterization of hypothesis in neurophilosophy. Principles of transdisciplinary methodology include the `principle of asymmetry', the `principle of bi-directionality' and the `principle of transdisciplinary circularity'. The `principle of asymmetry' points to an asymmetric relationship between logical and natural conditions. The `principle of bi-directionality' claims for the necessity of bi-directional linkage between natural and logical conditions. The `principle of transdisciplinary circularity' describes systematic rules for mutual comparison and cross-conditional exchange between philosophical theory and neuroscientific hypotheses. The relation between ontology and epistemology no longer is determined by ontological presuppositions i.e. ``ontological primacy'. Instead, there is correspondence between different `epistemological capacities' and different kinds of ontology which consecutively results in ``epistemic primacy' and ``ontological pluralism'. The present contribution concludes by rejecting some so-called `standard-arguments' including the `argument of circularity', the `argument of categorical fallacy', the `argument of validity' and the `argument of necessity'. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Emotional intelligence or adaptive emotions?

R. D. Roberts, M. Zeidner, and G. Matthews (2001) challenged the adequacy of the psychometric properties of the principal performance measure of emotional intelligence (EI). They raised doubt about the existence of emotion-related abilities that influence behavioral outcomes and social competence after controlling for general intelligence and personality. I agree with Roberts et al. that demonstrating the discriminant and predictive validity of a measure of EI in the context of rival predictors will require more research. I agree with the proponents of EI that emotion-related abilities do exist and show that such abilities in children account for unique variance in measures of adaptive behavior and social competence. However, evidence from developmental and clinical research suggest that these emotion-related abilities and their influence on socioemotional competence stem more from the direct effects of emotions than from a special form of intelligence.     

Electronic Diaries: A Feasible Method of Assessing Emotional Experiences in Youth?

The primary goal of this study was to examine whether electronic diaries are a feasible method of monitoring transitory emotional states with a school-age, community sample of youth. A second goal was to examine preliminary relations between indices of emotional functioning captured via electronic diaries and other measures of child emotional and psychological functioning. Participants included 38 youth between the ages of 7 and 12 (51% males, M age = 9 [1.52] years and 49% females, M age = 9 [1.94] years) and their mothers (M age = 39 years) and fathers (M age = 42 years). Children were prompted to indicate the intensity of their current emotion four times a day for 1 week using Palm Tungsten E2s. Youth also completed self-report measures of emotion intensity, awareness, and dysregulation. Parents completed measures of child emotion regulation and symptoms of externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. Sixty percent of the prompts were answered as intended. Higher levels of positive emotion intensity based on electronic diary ratings were negatively related to parent reports of adaptive emotion regulation and were positively related to youths’ reports of emotion dysregulation and poor emotion awareness. Given that the electronic diary data offered unique information on youth emotional functioning, strategies to increase compliance with the diaries are suggested.     

Radical Passivity: Ethical Problem or Solution? A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

In our present-day Western society, there has been an increasing tendency towards individualism and indifference and away from altruism and empathy. This has led to a resurgence of ethical concerns in contemporary Continental philosophy. Following the thinking of philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, ethics has come to be defined in terms of a disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Levinas claims that taking care of others in need is not a free, rational decision, but a fundamental responsibility that is pre-consciously felt. We are passively obligated before we can actively choose to help. Levinas therefore argues that the needy other incapacitates our normal selfish ways, and that this ‘radical passivity’ enables us to recognise our inherent responsibility towards others in need. Levinas’s own thinking on this subject is not unambiguous, however. While his early works stress the fact that we cannot care for others if we do not first take care of ourselves, his later works focus exclusively on the other as locus of our ethical responsibility. Following this line of thinking, a false opposition has emerged between an absolutised egoism and a crushing altruism that threatens to undermine the recent resurgence of ethical concerns. For how can we continue to care for others if we fail to recognise the duties we have towards ourselves? Moreover, what is the moral significance of responsible action if it is not freely chosen but passively imposed?     

Does Infant-Directed Speech Help Phonetic Learning? A Machine Learning Investigation

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant-directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult-directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: hyperarticulation, which makes the categories more separable, and variability, which makes the generalization more robust. Here, we test the separability and robustness of vowel category learning on acoustic representations of speech uttered by Japanese adults in ADS, IDS (addressed to 18- to 24-month olds), or read speech (RS). Separability is determined by means of a distance measure computed between the five short vowel categories of Japanese, while robustness is assessed by testing the ability of six different machine learning algorithms trained to classify vowels to generalize on stimuli spoken by a novel speaker in ADS. Using two different speech representations, we find that hyperarticulated speech, in the case of RS, can yield better separability, and that increased between-speaker variability in ADS can yield, for some algorithms, more robust categories. However, these conclusions do not apply to IDS, which turned out to yield neither more separable nor more robust categories compared to ADS inputs. We discuss the usefulness of machine learning algorithms run on real data to test hypotheses about the functional role of IDS.     

Is premedical education dehumanizing? A literature review

The thesis is examined that medical schools tend to recruit those who, because of a single-minded pursuit of admission, lack the breadth of interest and the social experience necessary for the development of a socially sensitive and emotionally mature personality. This negative characterization, labeled “the premed syndrome,” has been linked to a perceived lack of physician concern for patients, interpersonal warmth, and humanitarian care. This paper reviews the various published arguments advanced by proponents and opponents of this view, analyzing the presumed roots and implications and proposed remedies.     

Is ‘human action’ A category?

It seems to have been taken for granted that we all know what a human action is. However in attempting to draw from what philosophers have said about actions the necessary clues as to their distinguishing features, one finds little to discourage the idea that there is no way of distinguishing one category of occurrences, human actions, from the complex of different sorts of things which happen. From this I am tempted to conclude that there is no category of human action. But before drawing such a conclusion an ancient but terrible question must be faced: What sorts of things happen in the world ? This ancient question is faced but not answered. It is brought up because the failure to find a satisfactory answer to the question, Is human action a category? is a failure even to find a satisfactory assumption about what kind of reference the term ‘human action’ is supposed to have.     

Is There A Logic Of Confirmation Transfer?

This article begins by exploring a lost topic in the philosophy of science:the properties of the relations evidence confirming h confirmsh' and, more generally, evidence confirming each ofh₁, h₂, ..., h_m confirms at least one of h₁, h₂,ldots;, h_n'.The Bayesian understanding of confirmation as positive evidential relevanceis employed throughout. The resulting formal system is, to say the least, oddlybehaved. Some aspects of this odd behaviour the system has in common withsome of the non-classical logics developed in the twentieth century. Oneaspect – its ``parasitism' on classical logic – it does not, and it is this featurethat makes the system an interesting focus for discussion of questions in thephilosophy of logic. We gain some purchase on an answer to a recently prominentquestion, namely, what is a logical system? More exactly, we ask whether satisfaction of formal constraints is sufficient for a relation to be considered a (logical) consequence relation. The question whether confirmation transfer yields a logical system is answered in the negative, despite confirmation transfer having the standard properties of a consequence relation, on the grounds that validity of sequents in the system is not determined by the meanings of the connectives that occur in formulas. Developing the system in a different direction, we find it bears on the project of ``proof-theoretic semantics': conferring meaning on connectives by means of introduction (and possibly elimination) rules is not an autonomous activity, rather it presupposes a prior, non-formal,notion of consequence. Some historical ramifications are alsoaddressed briefly.     

Does Emotional Arousal Influence Swearing Fluency?

This study assessed the effect of experimentally manipulated emotional arousal on swearing fluency. We hypothesised that swear word generation would be increased with raised emotional arousal. The emotional arousal of 60 participants was manipulated by having them play a first-person shooter video game or, as a control, a golf video game, in a randomised order. A behavioural measure of swearing fluency based on the Controlled Oral Word Association Test was employed. Successful experimental manipulation was indicated by raised State Hostility Questionnaire scores after playing the shooter game. Swearing fluency was significantly greater after playing the shooter game compared with the golf game. Validity of the swearing fluency task was demonstrated via positive correlations with self-reported swearing fluency and daily swearing frequency. In certain instances swearing may represent a form of emotional expression. This finding will inform debates around the acceptability of using taboo language.     

What Is This Thing Called Mental Toughness? An Investigation of Elite Sport Performers

The literature on mental toughness is characterized by a general lack of conceptual clarity and consensus as to its definition, as well as a general failure to operationalize the construct in a consistent manner. This study addressed two fundamental issues surrounding mental toughness: how can it be defined? and what are the essential attributes required to be a mentally tough performer? Ten international performers participated in either a focus group or one-toone interviews, from which a definition of mental toughness and the attributes of the ideal mentally tough performer emerged. The resulting definition emphasized both general and specific dimensions, while the 12 attributes covered self-belief, desire/motivation, dealing with pressure and anxiety, focus (performance-related), focus (lifestyle-related), and pain/hardship factors.