Perspective chapter: Enacting Emotional Intelligence from the bidirectional link between Mood and Reasoning

Abstract

During the last 20 years, the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has gained significant attention in psychology. Traditionally, EI has been conceptualized as the ability to reason with and/or about one’s own emotions and/or in the presence of emotion-related stimuli. This chapter presents an enactive framework for conceptualizing EI as a context-sensitive, dynamic, emerging and purposeful ability. We describe a bidirectional relationship between mood and reasoning processes, building on the dual-process model of reasoning. First, we report evidence showing how mood can impair reasoning capacity. Mood also interacts with task content relevance, which can suppress detrimental effects of induced mood on reasoning. The dynamic influence of mood on reasoning can be explained by the cognitive load induced by positive and negative moods that saturates System 2 involved in EI-related reasoning. Furthermore, negative mood could promote EI-related reasoning based on System 2, while positive mood could promote EI-related reasoning based on System 1. In this framework, mood regulation plays a central role in EI. Then, we discuss how the reasoning abilities of each EI subcomponent can influence mood. Overall, those proposals can be conceived within a cycle including both mood and reasoning, in the context of need regulation. The coordination between those various factors contributes to enacting EI.