Trait Emotional Intelligence as a Predictor of Adaptive Responses to Positive and Negative Affect During Adolescence.

Diego Gómez-Baya,Ramón Mendoza

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02525

Abstract

Introduction and aim : The examination of trait emotional intelligence as an important component of adolescent psychological adjustment and coping has received a great deal of attention. Trait emotional intelligence is expected to reduce the vulnerability to emotional problems by reducing mood deterioration in adverse situations. Most research to date has addressed the regulation of negative affective states, with less attention paid to the responses to positive affect. Thus, the aim of this research was to examine the cross-sectional and prospective associations between trait emotional intelligence dimensions (i.e., trait emotional attention, trait emotional clarity, and trait emotional repair), response styles to negative affect (i.e., depressive rumination and distraction) and response to positive affect (i.e., emotion-focused and self-focused positive rumination and dampening) in adolescence.Methods: A 1-year follow-up study was conducted with a sample of 880 adolescents (52.4% girls) aged 14–17 years old (M = 14.74, SD = 0.68) who were enrolled in 18 high schools in Andalusia (Spain). Participants completed self-report measures of trait emotional intelligence, response to negative affect and response styles to positive affect. To analyse the data, hierarchical regression analyses and path analysis were performed.Results: Our results showed that high trait emotional attention was cross-sectionally and longitudinally associated with more dampening of positive affect and more depressive rumination. Furthermore, high trait emotional repair was cross-sectionally and longitudinally related to more distraction to negative affect and more self-focused positive rumination. Some gender differences were also found; girls reported higher trait emotional attention, higher dampening, and higher depressive rumination. Furthermore, boys reported higher trait emotional repair, higher self-focused positive rumination and higher distraction to negative affect.Conclusions and discussion: Our findings provide longitudinal evidence of the relationships between trait emotional intelligence and responses to both positive and negative affect during adolescence. Consequently, interventions designed to promote resilience during adolescence could target the development of more adaptive responses to both negative and positive affect within the framework of school-based emotional education programmes.

Highlights

Introduction and aimThe examination of trait emotional intelligence as an important component of adolescent psychological adjustment and coping has received a great deal of attention
Concerning the first goal, the results indicated that girls reported lower trait emotional intelligence (EI), i.e., increased emotional attention and lower emotional clarity and repair, consistent with results by Extremera et al (2007) and Szymanowicz and Furnham (2013), who argued that girls seem to underestimate their emotional skills
Girls indicated fewer adaptive responses to positive affect and fewer adaptive responses to negative affect than boys, which is consistent with previous studies (Rood et al, 2009; Gomez-Baya et al, 2017b)

Summary

Introduction

The examination of trait emotional intelligence as an important component of adolescent psychological adjustment and coping has received a great deal of attention. The literature to date has concluded that emotional intelligence (EI) is an important component of adolescent psychological adjustment, and coping has recently drawn great interest. In a later work, Davis and Humphrey (2014) concluded that the effect of ability EI on adolescent adaptive coping depended on perceived competency, or trait EI. They argued that despite high scores in ability EI, low self-confidence activates avoidant coping, which does not attenuate the impact of stress. Trait EI is expected to play a key role in adolescents’ psychological adjustment (Davis and Humphrey, 2012b)

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