Experiential and Strategic Emotional Intelligence Are Implicated When Inhibiting Affective and Non-Affective Distractors: Findings from Three Emotional Flanker N-Back Tasks

Understanding the Emotional Intelligence Discourse on Social Media: Insights from the Analysis of Twitter

Social networks have created an information diffusion corpus that provides users with an environment where they can express their views, form a community, and discuss topics of similar or dissimilar interests. Even though there has been an increasingly rising demand for conducting an emotional analysis of the users on social media platforms, the field of emotional intelligence (EI) has been rather slow in exploiting the enormous potential that social media can play in the research and practice of the framework. This study, thus, tried to examine the role that the microblogging platform Twitter plays in enhancing the understanding of the EI community by building on the Twitter Analytics framework of Natural Language Processing to further develop the insights of EI research and practice. An analysis was conducted on 53,361 tweets extracted using the hashtag emotional intelligence through descriptive analytics (DA), content analytics (CA), and network analytics (NA). The findings indicated that emotional intelligence tweets are used mostly by speakers, psychologists (or other medical professionals), and business organizations, among others. They use it for information dissemination, communication with stakeholders, and hiring. These tweets carry strong positive sentiments and sparse connectedness. The findings present insights into the use of social media for understanding emotional intelligence.

Can We "Brain-Train" Emotional Intelligence? A Narrative Review on the Features and Approaches Used in Ability EI Training Studies

Recent studies had demonstrated that specific emotional intelligence (EI) abilities (as measured using the MSCEIT) were related to better performance on cognitive tasks that involved emotional information but not on their non-emotional counterparts. These findings suggest that cognitive control and other executive functioning processes (e.g., working memory) contribute to EI abilities. A well-functioning EI ability is crucial for a number of everyday activities and life outcomes. However, the evidence for training ability EI remains vague as to how these improvements occur. The purpose of this narrative review was to synthesize findings from past EI training research, specifically focusing on their methodology. This was to identify key aspects of the interventions used, to determine the prototypical features between them, as well as to propose a compelling research agenda for future EI training studies. Based on the features found in these studies, we identified two possible approaches in which EI improvements occurred. The first approach was through increasing emotional knowledge and related competencies through teaching and practice. These features were found in the majority of training interventions using a workshop-style training format, reflections, role-plays, and practice with other participants. The second approach used brain-training principles to improve basic cognitive processes, such as executive control or emotional inhibition. Using a cognitive training approach to EI training can provide several advantages, such as allowing researchers to examine EI improvements using the theories of (1) transfer; (2) plasticity; and (3) process-specific changes.