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Université catholique de Louvain

Emotional intelligence Is it relevant to the study of decision making?

Moïra Mikolajczak

ARC seminar, November 5 2007

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Outline of the presentation

• Emotions and decision-making

• Emotion-related individual differences

• ERID and decision-making

• Which ERID should we focus on?

• How to measure those ERID?

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Emotions and decision-making

(1) Emotion: an essential ingredient -> accelerate the decision-making process (reduce the amount of

information to be processed)

-> prevent us from hesitating endlessly between two options

(2) The emotion – decision marriage: for better or for worse!

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How and where do emotions influence the decision making process?

A. Intake/reflection≠ emotions are associated with ≠ ways of processing

information

- perception (e.g., global vs detail, …)

- memory (+/- , …)- judgment (+/- , …)

B. Action/strategy≠ emotions are associated with ≠ action tendencies

- approach- avoidance

Emotions and decision-making (2)

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Global vs Detail(Fredrickson & Branigan; Cognition & Emotion, 2005)

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Global vs Detail(Fredrickson & Branigan; Cognition & Emotion, 2005)

*

▲ ▲▲

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Global vs Detail(Fredrickson & Branigan; Cognition & Emotion, 2005)

▲ ▲▲

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Emotions can both enhance and bias decision making (e.g., recruitment)

(Quod erat demonstrandum: The marriage is for better or for worse…!)

How to optimize their influence and reduce the biases? (1) Identify one’s emotion and its antecedents

(2) Regulate one’s emotion when irrelevant

(N.B. These solutions are useful in other types of marriages as well…)

Emotions and decision-making (3)

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ERID and decision-making

• If emotions are relevant to the study of decision making, emotion-related individual differences should be relevant too…

• Which are the most relevant ERIDs to the study of decision-making?

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The following dimensions seem particularly relevant:

• Valence of trait affectivity (Positive emotions reduce own-race bias in face recognition -> do people who experience

more trait positive affect are less subject to this bias?)

• Ability to identify one’s emotions(are people who are more able to identify their emotions less likely to be led astray by

irrelevant emotions?)

• Ability to analyze the causes and likely consequences of one’s emotions

(idem)

• Ability to regulate one’s emotions(idem)

ERID and decision-making (2)

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• Different tools• One interesting construct: emotional

intelligence (EI)• EI aims to capture individual differences in the

extent to which individuals experience, identify, regulate and utilize emotion-related information of an intra-personal or interpersonal nature (Petrides & Furnham, 2003).

How to best capture those ERID?

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Abilities

(ability to apply knowledge to a problem solving

situation and toimplement a given strategy)

Knowledge

(complexity and width of emotion knowledge)

Traits = dispositions

(propensity to put one’s abilities into practice,

frequency with which one uses his/her abilities)

Three loosely interconnected levels of emotional intelligence

(Mikolajczak et al., in preparation)

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Abilities

(ability to apply knowledge to a problem solving situation and actually

implement a given strategy)

Knowledge

(complexity and width of conceptual-declarative emotion knowledge)

Traits = dispositions

(propensity to put one’s abilities into practice,

frequency with which one uses his/her abilities)

Most relevant level to decision-making: trait EI

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Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (Petrides & Furnham, 2003)* : 153-item questionnaire encompassing 15 affect-related dispositions, forming 4 dimensions:

*French validation: Mikolajczak, Luminet, Leroy & Roy (2007) Journal of Personality Assessment

Well-being (usual and forecasted valence of emotional experience: e.g., happiness, optimism)

Self-control (regulation of one’s emotions and impulses)

Emotional sensitivity (e.g., emotion perception, emotion expression, empathy)

Sociability (utilization of emotions in social relationships: e.g., others’ emotion management)

How to measure emotion-related dispositions?

! Notion of adaptation !

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Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (Petrides & Furnham, 2003)* : 153-item questionnaire encompassing 15 affect-related personality traits, forming 4 dimensions:

*French validation: Mikolajczak, Luminet, Leroy & Roy (2007) Journal of Personality Assessment

Well-being (usual and forecasted valence of emotional experience: e.g., happiness, optimism)

Self-control (regulation of one’s emotions and impulses)

Emotional sensitivity (e.g., emotion perception, emotion expression, empathy)

Sociability (utilization of emotions in social relationships: e.g., others’ emotion management)

How to measure trait EI?

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Are self-reported measures of ERID reliable and valid?

• Some have claimed that…- people have little insight into their own emotional

functioning- EI is too much of a desirable characteristic to be reliably

assessed through self-reports- trait EI is a useless construct given that emotional

dispositions can already be assessed through the Big Five

• Is this true???

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F1: Well-being

• Global and well-being TEIQue scores predict around 25% variance of state PA and NA measured several weeks apart.

• These findings replicated in 4 studies

• Predictions hold when social desirability is controlled for.

• Trait EI predicts incremental variance over and above the Big Five dimensions (while the opposite is not true).

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F2: Emotion RegulationPredictive validity

To be deemed reliable, self-reports of trait EI should predict the biological response to a laboratory stressor. Easy to investigate because there exist a reliable indicator of stress in the body: the cortisol

Incremental validity

To be deemed useful, trait EI should bring additional information in the prediction of stress over and above established personality constructs

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I. Method*

Sample: 56 healthy young men

Procedure:

*Mikolajczak, Roy, Luminet, Fillée, & de Timary (in press) Psychoneuroendocrinology

Experimental manipulation

Neutral: Documentary Stress: public speech task

3 weeks later

Measure of : - emotional intelligence,- alexithymia - the Big Five- social desirability

Baseline cortisol

Cortisol in response to stress

Cortisol during recuperation

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IIa. Results at the subjective levela) Moderating effect of EI

significant EI x condition interaction effect

b) Incremental validity of EIEI retained its predictive power after controlling for the main and interaction effects of social desirability, alexithymia, and the Big Five factors of personality (all together)

Mood deterioration as a function of Condition and Trait EI

-1

-0,5

0

0,5

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Emotional intelligence

NA

2-N

A1

(z)

Stress

Neutral

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IIb. Results at the biological levela) Moderating effect of EI

significant EI x condition interaction effect (d > 1)Cortisol secretion in the Stressful

Condition

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b) Incremental validity of EIEI retained its predictive power after controlling for the main and interaction effects of alexithymia and the Big Five factors of personality

Cortisol Secretion in the Neutral Condition

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F3: Emotional Sensitivity

• Accuracy of emotion identification in the self is difficult to study but Petrides & Furnham (2003) showed that higher trait EI scores were related to faster emotion recognition in others

• No study on empathy

F4: « Sociability »• Children scoring higher on trait EI measures are

perceived as having more leadership qualities and as being more pro-social than their low trait EI peers

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IV. DiscussionContributions

People have some insight into their emotional functioning : (1) effect size on cortisol measures was not lower than on subjective measures; (2) the level of trait EI did not moderate the relationship between subjective and cortisol measures

Trait EI’s predictions hold when social desirability is controlled for Trait EI has predicts additional variance over and above existing

personality measures

EI appears to be a useful construct to capture individual differences in emotion-related dispositions

Future directions Are higher trait EI scores better decision-makers? How does trait EI (and trait EI factors) interact with the context? To what extent is EI modifiable and with which effects on decision

making?

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Thank you for your attention

Contact Moira.mikolajczak@uclouvain.be