Emotional intelligence, personality and the decoding of non-verbal expressions of emotion

Associations of Personality Traits and Emotional Intelligence: Comparing Individuals in Rehabilitation from Drug Misuse, Occasional Users and Non-Users

Background: Personality traits and Emotional Intelligence abilities have gained a central place in the etiology of drug use, although understudied until recently. Objective: To examine the associations between personality traits and Emotional Intelligence in people that are in process of rehabilitation from drug misuse, to compare them with occasional users and non-users and to estimate the factors associated with the likelihood of drug misuse. Methods: 244 individuals (52.5% male) participated in the study. Sixty of them were suffering from drug misuse disorders, thirty-two were individuals that used drugs occasionally and 142 were non-users. Personality was assessed with the EPQ and Emotional Intelligence with the WEILS. Results: Results suggested that in drug misuse, emotional use and regulation are positively correlated with extraversion, and negatively correlated with neuroticism, whilst people that misuse drugs differ from occasional and non-users in emotional use and regulation, and in all personality traits except extraversion. Regression analyses proposed that a combination of sex, age, emotional regulation, and neuroticism contributes to the likelihood of a person abusing drugs, as opposed to occasional or no use. Conclusion: Our findings showcase that Emotional Intelligence and personality traits indeed play an important role in drug use, specifically when considering factors that protect from or drive towards misuse. Such results call for the implementation of preventive programs for occasional drug users and therapeutic interventions for people that misuse drugs, targeting the levels of neuroticism and enhancing the ability of regulating the negative emotions, to protect from drug misuse.

Do Individual Differences Influence Moment-by-Moment Reports of Emotion Perceived in Music and Speech Prosody?

Comparison of emotion perception in music and prosody has the potential to contribute to an understanding of their speculated shared evolutionary origin. Previous research suggests shared sensitivity to and processing of music and speech, but less is known about how emotion perception in the auditory domain might be influenced by individual differences. Personality, emotional intelligence, gender, musical training and age exert some influence on discrete, summative judgments of perceived emotion in music and speech stimuli. However, music and speech are temporal phenomena, and little is known about whether individual differences influence moment-by-moment perception of emotion in these domains. A behavioral study collected two main types of data: continuous ratings of perceived emotion while listening to extracts of music and speech, using a computer interface which modeled emotion on two dimensions (arousal and valence), and demographic information including measures of personality (TIPI) and emotional intelligence (TEIQue-SF). Functional analysis of variance on the time series data revealed a small number of statistically significant differences associated with Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, musical training and age. The results indicate that individual differences exert limited influence on continuous judgments of dynamic, naturalistic expressions. We suggest that this reflects a reliance on acoustic cues to emotion in moment-by-moment judgments of perceived emotions and is further evidence of the shared sensitivity to and processing of music and speech.

Individual Differences in Facial Emotion Processing

This study tested whether trait emotional intelligence (TEI) measures of narrow bandwidth predict perception of facial emotion, using two tasks: identification of microexpressions of emotion and controlled visual search for target emotions. A total of 129 undergraduates completed multiple scales for TEI, as well as cognitive ability, personality, and stress measures. TEI was associated with a reduced stress response, but failed to predict performance on either task, contrary to the initial hypothesis. However, performance related significantly to higher cognitive intelligence, subjective task engagement, and use of task-focused coping. Individual differences in attentional resources may support processing of both emotive and non-emotive stimuli.

Nonverbal signals speak up: association between perceptual nonverbal dominance and emotional intelligence

Emotional communication uses verbal and nonverbal means. In case of conflicting signals, nonverbal information is assumed to have a stronger impact. It is unclear, however, whether perceptual nonverbal dominance varies between individuals and whether it is linked to emotional intelligence. Using audiovisual stimulus material comprising verbal and nonverbal emotional cues that were varied independently, perceptual nonverbal dominance profiles and their relations to emotional intelligence were examined. Nonverbal dominance was found in every participant, ranging from 55 to 100%. Moreover, emotional intelligence, particularly the ability to understand emotions, correlated positively with nonverbal dominance. Furthermore, higher overall emotional intelligence as well as a higher ability to understand emotions were linked to smaller reaction time differences between emotionally incongruent and congruent stimuli. The association between perceptual nonverbal dominance and emotional intelligence, and more specifically the ability to understand emotions, might reflect an adaptive process driven by the experience of higher authenticity in nonverbal cues.