Abstract
In this article, we provide preliminary evidence for the ‘hypersensitivity hypothesis’, according to which Emotional Intelligence (EI) functions as a magnifier of emotional experience, enhancing the effect of emotion and emotion information on thinking and social perception. Measuring ability EI, and in particular Emotion Understanding, we describe an experiment designed to determine whether, relative to those low in EI, individuals high in EI were more affected by the valence of a scenario describing a target when making an affective social judgment. Employing a sample of individuals from the general population, high EI participants were found to provide more extreme (positive or negative) impressions of the target as a function of the scenario valence: positive information about the target increased high EI participants’ positive impressions more than it increased low EI participants’ impressions, and negative information increased their negative impressions more. In addition, EI affected the amount of recalled information and this led high EI individuals to intensify their affective ratings of the target. These initial results show that individuals high on EI may be particularly sensitive to emotions and emotion information, and they suggest that this hypersensitivity might account for both the beneficial and detrimental effects of EI documented in the literature. Implications are discussed.
Highlights
Emotional Intelligence (EI) was introduced into the psychological literature as a form of intelligence that concerns using emotions to guide thinking and action (Salovey andMayer 1990)
To start our discussion of relevant previous research, we first consider some ways in which individuals vary in processing information as a function of their level of EI, where necessary, specifying whether the effects that we describe were associated with trait EI or ability EI
We focused on the Emotion Understanding component of the Salovey and Mayer (1997) ability model: First, from a conceptual point of view the relationship between the type of cognitive processes involved in the current study, namely perception and retrieval of emotion information conveyed through language, should be stronger for EI conceptualized as the capacity to process and use emotion information to support thinking and behavior (Mayer et al 2008)
Summary
Emotional Intelligence (EI) was introduced into the psychological literature as a form of intelligence that concerns using emotions to guide thinking and action An approach to mechanisms underlying EI, discussed in another review of the literature (Lea et al 2019), explores the possibility that EI might work as a “stress buffer” that lowers acute stress in emotionally demanding situations, a view initially proposed by Mikolajczak et al (2009) Their results showed that the association between EI and stress reactivity and recovery differed depending on the stress context and on how stress was measured, with trait EI helping only in some contexts. In sum, there is evidence that regardless of whether measured using trait EI or ability EI, high EI, often conferring advantages to individuals, can sometimes result in outcomes that can be disadvantageous to the individual, and there is reason to believe that one function of EI might be to amplify the effects of valenced information on emotional experience
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