The Roles of Fluid Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence in Affective Decision-Making During the Transition to Early Adolescence.

Danfeng Li,Mengli Wu,Xingli Zhang,Mingyi Wang,Jiannong Shi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574903

Abstract

The current study mainly explored the influence of fluid intelligence (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EI) on affective decision-making from a developmental perspective, specifically, during the transition from childhood into early adolescence. Meanwhile, their age-related differences in affective decision-making were explored. A total of 198 participants aged 8–12 completed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), the Cattell’s Culture Fair Intelligence Test and the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Child Form. Based on the net scores of IGT, the development of affective decision-making ability did not increase monotonically with age, and there was a developmental trend of an impaired IGT performance in early adolescence (aged 11–12), especially in the early learning phase (first 40 trials) of the IGT. More importantly, IQ and EI played different roles for children and early adolescents: IQ and EI jointly predicted the IGT performance for 8–10 years old children, whereas only EI contributed to the IGT performance of 11–12 years old early adolescents. The present study extends the evidence how cognitive processing and emotional processing interact in affective decision-making from the developmental perspective. Furthermore, it provides insights of future research and intervention with early adolescents’ poor affective decision-making.

Highlights

Adolescence is a period of increasing emotional sensitivity and poor self-control that is often accompanied by risky behaviors and poor decision-making, such as drug abuse, binge drinking, reckless driving, unprotected sex, or criminal activities (Arnett, 1992; Casey et al, 2008; Steinberg, 2008; Prencipe et al, 2011)
ANOVA was conducted with age as the independent variable and the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) total net score as the dependent variable
It is worth mentioning that the total net score of the 12 years old IGT was the lowest, indicating that early adolescents may have a relatively poor affective decisionmaking ability

Summary

Introduction

Adolescence is a period of increasing emotional sensitivity and poor self-control that is often accompanied by risky behaviors and poor decision-making, such as drug abuse, binge drinking, reckless driving, unprotected sex, or criminal activities (Arnett, 1992; Casey et al, 2008; Steinberg, 2008; Prencipe et al, 2011). Ill-consider decisions made during early adolescence might carry life-long consequences thereafter, which includes poverty, poor well-being, and even mortality (Spear, 2000; Mahalik et al, 2013). Their maturational imbalance between a slowly developed “cold” system (cognitive) and the excessive “hot” system. Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is the most widely used paradigm for evaluating individual affective decision-making including children, adolescents and adults in that it involves unpredictable gains or losses similar to real-life choices (Bechara et al, 1994). The total net scores are used to assess the performance in IGT, which can be calculated by subtracting the total number of disadvantageous decks from total advantageous decks. A higher and positive difference score indicates a more successful performance in affective decision-making

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Conclusion