Gender differences in the relationship between emotional intelligence and right hemisphere lateralization for facial processing

Functional lateralization in social-emotional processing: The influence of sexual orientation and gender identity on cradling preferences

The left-cradling bias (i.e., the motor asymmetry for cradling infants on the left side) has often been associated to the right-hemispheric social-emotional specialization, and it has often been reported to be stronger in females than in males. In this study we explored the effects of sexual orientation and gender identity on this lateral bias by means of a web-based investigation in a sample of adults (485 biological females and 196 biological males) recruited through LGBTQIA+ networks and general university forums. We exploited a cradling imagery task to assess participants' cradling-side preference, and standardized questionnaires to assess participants' homosexuality (Klein Sexual Orientation Grid) and gender nonconformity (Gender Identity/Gender Dysphoria Questionnaire for Adults and Adolescents). Results confirmed the expected left-cradling bias across all sexual orientation groups except for heterosexual males. Importantly, higher homosexuality scores were associated with higher proportions of left cradling in males. These results suggest that sexual orientation can influence cradling preference in males, indicating a complex interaction between biological and psychological factors in the laterality of social-emotional processing. Finally, the left-cradling bias seems to confirm its role as a behavioral proxy of social-emotional functional lateralization in humans.

Body surface temperature of rats reveals both magnitude and sex differences in the acute stress response

Understanding how biological markers of stress relate to stressor magnitude is much needed and can be used in welfare assessment. Changes in body surface temperature can be measured using infrared thermography (IRT) as a marker of a physiological response to acute stress. While an avian study has shown that changes in body surface temperature can reflect the intensity of acute stress, little is known about surface temperature responses to stressors of different magnitudes and its sex-specificity in mammals, and how they correlate with hormonal and behavioural responses. We used IRT to collect continuous surface temperature measurements of tail and eye of adult male and female rats (Rattus norvegicus), for 30 minutes after exposure to one of three stressors (small cage, encircling handling or rodent restraint cone) for one minute, and cross-validated the thermal response with plasma corticosterone (CORT) and behavioural assessment. To obtain individual baseline temperatures and thermal responses to stress, rats were imaged in a test arena (to which they were habituated) for 30 seconds before and 30 minutes after being exposed to the stressor. In response to the three stressors, tail temperature initially decreased and then recovered to, or overshot the baseline temperature. Tail temperature dynamics differed between stressors; being restrained in the small cage was associated with the smallest drop in temperature, in male rats, and the fastest thermal recovery, in both sexes. Increases in eye temperature only distinguished between stressors early in the response and only in females. The post stressor increase in eye temperature was greater in the right eye of males and the left eye of females. In both sexes encircling may have been associated with the fastest increase in CORT. These results were in line with observed behavioural changes, with greater movement in rats exposed to the small cage and higher immobility after encircling. The female tail and eye temperature, as well as the CORT concentrations did not return to pre-stressor levels in the observation period, in conjunction with the greater occurrence of escape-related behaviours in female rats. These results suggest that female rats are more vulnerable to acute restraint stress compared to male rats and emphasise the importance of using both sexes in future investigations of stressor magnitude. This study demonstrates that acute stress induced changes in mammalian surface temperature measured with IRT relate to the magnitude of restraint stress, indicate sex differences and correlate with hormonal and behavioural responses. Thus, IRT has the potential to become a non-invasive method of continuous welfare assessment in unrestrained mammals.

Emotional Intelligence, Intelligence and Social Skills in Different Areas of Work and Leadership

Abstract The organizational environment has an ever-increasing need for psychological constructs such as Emotional Intelligence (EI), Social Skills (SS) and Intelligence (G), despite the lack of empirical scientific research on those variables with regard to the working environment, specially EI and SS. Thus, the goal of the present study was to measure such variables presented by professionals in different areas and leadership roles in the organizational context. There were 120 participants, from four major areas in the organization, both leaders and non-leaders. The main results showed no significant difference in EI between the different areas, lower EI scores for leaders when compared to those being led and no difference in G and in SS general score between leaders and non-leaders. This contributes to reflections on the conduction of current selection processes and promotion criteria in organizations.

Inteligência emocional

A Inteligência Emocional (IE) é um construto psicológico amplamente divulgado nas últimas duas décadas, principalmente fora do meio acadêmico, mas requer uma maior diversidade de pesquisas científicas que contribuam para sua solidificação. Portanto, este trabalho buscou analisar a relação de IE com Inteligência (G), idade, sexo, renda familiar, escolaridade e Habilidades Sociais (HS). Participaram 120 pessoas, entre 18 e 61 anos de idade, de ambos os sexos, que responderam aos testes de percepção e de compreensão emocional, raciocínio abstrato e verbal e habilidades sociais. Os resultados encontrados indicaram correlação significativa positiva entre IE, G e escolaridade, negativa entre IE e idade, nenhuma correlação entre IE, HS e renda familiar e nenhuma diferença entre homens e mulheres para IE, sendo o raciocínio abstrato a variável mais preditora do construto. Tais informações auxiliam para uma melhor compreensão da IE e da sua relevância atual.

An EEG Study on Emotional Intelligence and Advertising Message Effectiveness

Some electroencephalography (EEG) studies have investigated emotional intelligence (EI), but none have examined the relationships between EI and commercial advertising messages and related consumer behaviors. This study combines brain (EEG) techniques with an EI psychometric to explore the brain responses associated with a range of advertisements. A group of 45 participants (23 females, 22 males) had their EEG recorded while watching a series of advertisements selected from various marketing categories such as community interests, celebrities, food/drink, and social issues. Participants were also categorized as high or low in emotional intelligence (n = 34). The EEG data analysis was centered on rating decision-making in order to measure brain responses associated with advertising information processing for both groups. The findings suggest that participants with high and low emotional intelligence (EI) were attentive to different types of advertising messages. The two EI groups demonstrated preferences for “people” or “object,” related advertising information. This suggests that differences in consumer perception and emotions may suggest why certain advertising material or marketing strategies are effective or not.

Emotional intelligence among medical students: a mixed methods study from Chennai, India

BACKGROUND

Emotional Intelligence is the ability of a person to understand and respond to one's own and others' emotions and use this understanding to guide one's thoughts and actions. To assess the level of emotional intelligence of medical students in a medical college in Chennai and to explore their understanding of the role of emotions in medical practice.

METHODS

A quantitative, cross sectional, questionnaire based, survey was conducted among 207 medical students in a college in Chennai, India using the Quick Emotional Intelligence Self Assessment Test and some hypothetical emotional clinical vignettes. This was followed by a qualitative moderated fish-bowl discussion to elicit the opinion of medical students on role of emotions in the practice of medicine.

RESULTS

The mean score of Emotional Intelligence was 107.58 (SD 16.44) out of a maximum possible score of 160. Students who went to government schools for high school education had greater emotional intelligence than students from private schools (p = 0.044) and women were more emotionally intelligent in their response to emotional vignettes than men (p = 0.056). The fish bowl discussion highlighted several positive and negative impacts of emotions in clinical care. The students concluded at the end of the discussion that emotions are inevitable in the practice of medicine and a good physician should know how to handle them.

CONCLUSIONS

Medical students, both men and women, had good level of emotional intelligence in the college that was studied. Students from collectivist social settings like government high schools have better emotional intelligence, which may indicate that a collectivist, community oriented medical education can serve the same purpose. Though students have diverse opinions on the role of emotions in clinical care, cognitive reflection exercises can help them understand its importance.

Association between Ability Emotional Intelligence and Left Insula during Social Judgment of Facial Emotions

The human ability of identifying, processing and regulating emotions from social stimuli is generally referred as Emotional Intelligence (EI). Within EI, Ability EI identifies a performance measure assessing individual skills at perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. Previous models suggest that a brain "somatic marker circuitry" (SMC) sustains emotional sub-processes included in EI. Three primary brain regions are included: the amygdala, the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here, our aim was to investigate the relationship between Ability EI scores and SMC activity during social judgment of emotional faces. Sixty-three healthy subjects completed a test measuring Ability EI and underwent fMRI during a social decision task (i.e. approach or avoid) about emotional faces with different facial expressions. Imaging data revealed that EI scores are associated with left insula activity during social judgment of emotional faces as a function of facial expression. Specifically, higher EI scores are associated with greater left insula activity during social judgment of fearful faces but also with lower activity of this region during social judgment of angry faces. These findings indicate that the association between Ability EI and the SMC activity during social behavior is region- and emotion-specific.

Patience and Mental Health in Iranian Students

BACKGROUND

While the role of some personality traits has been comprehensively explored, scientific study of others, such as patience has been neglected. Psychologists have paid scant attention to patience as a personality trait, character strength or virtue.

OBJECTIVES

The current study examined the relationship between patience and life satisfaction, mental health, and personality.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A sample of 252 Iranian college students (129 females and 123 males) completed the 3-factor patience scale, satisfaction with life scale, general health questionnaire, anxiety and depression scales and mini international personality item pool-big five.

RESULTS

The three types of patience (interpersonal, life hardship, and daily hassles) were associated with higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression, anxiety and psychological dysfunction. Patience also showed moderate relationship with the Big-Five factors of personality. After controlling the personality factors, patience managed to explain additional unique variance in life satisfaction and mental health indicators.

CONCLUSIONS

Patience is a unique predictor of mental well-being. It is suggested that long-term patience is more important for depression and general health, whereas short-term patience is more beneficial for hedonic well-being.

PERVALE-S: a new cognitive task to assess deaf people's ability to perceive basic and social emotions

A poorly understood aspect of deaf people (DP) is how their emotional information is processed. Verbal ability is key to improve emotional knowledge in people. Nevertheless, DP are unable to distinguish intonation, intensity, and the rhythm of language due to lack of hearing. Some DP have acquired both lip-reading abilities and sign language, but others have developed only sign language. PERVALE-S was developed to assess the ability of DP to perceive both social and basic emotions. PERVALE-S presents different sets of visual images of a real deaf person expressing both basic and social emotions, according to the normative standard of emotional expressions in Spanish Sign Language. Emotional expression stimuli were presented at two different levels of intensity (1: low; and 2: high) because DP do not distinguish an object in the same way as hearing people (HP) do. Then, participants had to click on the more suitable emotional expression. PERVALE-S contains video instructions (given by a sign language interpreter) to improve DP's understanding about how to use the software. DP had to watch the videos before answering the items. To test PERVALE-S, a sample of 56 individuals was recruited (18 signers, 8 lip-readers, and 30 HP). Participants also performed a personality test (High School Personality Questionnaire adapted) and a fluid intelligence (Gf) measure (RAPM). Moreover, all deaf participants were rated by four teachers for the deaf.

RESULTS

there were no significant differences between deaf and HP in performance in PERVALE-S. Confusion matrices revealed that embarrassment, envy, and jealousy were worse perceived. Age was just related to social-emotional tasks (but not in basic emotional tasks). Emotional perception ability was related mainly to warmth and consciousness, but negatively related to tension. Meanwhile, Gf was related to only social-emotional tasks. There were no gender differences.

Processing emotion from the eyes: a divided visual field and ERP study

The right cerebral hemisphere is preferentially involved in recognising at least some facial expressions of emotion. We investigated whether there is a laterality effect in judging emotions from the eyes. In one task a pair of emotionally expressive eyes presented in central vision had to be physically matched to a subsequently presented set of eyes in one or other visual hemifield (eyes condition). In the second task a word was presented centrally followed by a set of eyes to left or right hemifield and the participant had to decide whether the word correctly described the emotion portrayed by the laterally presented set of eyes (word condition). Participants were a group of undergraduate students and a group of older volunteers (> 50). There was no visual hemifield difference in accuracy or raw response times in either task for either group, but log-transformed times showed an overall left hemifield advantage. Contrary to the right hemisphere ageing hypothesis, older participants showed no evidence of a relative right hemisphere decline in performance on the tasks. In the younger group mean peak amplitude of the N170 component of the EEG at lateral posterior electrode sites was significantly greater over the right hemisphere (T6/PO2) than the left (T5/PO1) in both the perceptual recognition task and the emotional judgement task. It was significantly greater for the task of judging emotion than in the eyes-matching task. In future it would be useful to combine electrophysiological techniques with lateralised visual input in studying lateralisation of emotion with older as well as younger participants.