Emotional Intelligence and Databases

Majella Barkley, QUB

Overview

• Background.• What is Emotional Intelligence/how is it

assessed?• Problems with EI.• EI and databases.• Databases as a tool for EI research.• EI and Labelling databases.• Present work.

Background to EI

• Arose from a feeling that insufficient attention was being paid to individual differences in emotion.

• A belief that the abilities to recognise and regulate emotion have important implications for everyday life.

• An intuitively appealing idea.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

• EI aims to account for individual differences in emotion.

• Initially proposed as an intelligence by (Salovey and Mayer, 1990).

• Now developed into 2 separate constructs that fall under the heading of Emotional Intelligence, (Petrides and Furnham, 2001).

What is EI?

May now be viewed either as…….

…..“Ability EI” an intelligence (a set of cognitive abilities for emotion), refers to thinking skills.

Or

…..“Trait EI” as a personality trait (an emotional behavioural style).

How is EI assessed?

• Type of EI examined determines measurements used.

• Trait EI - Self-report measures EQ-i, (Bar-On, 1997). TEIQue, (Petrides and Furnham, 2003).

• Ability EI - Performance measures MSCEIT, (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2002).

Problems with EI

Ability EI• Major obstacle for Ability EI research is making

the subjective experience of emotion more objective.

Trait EI

• Issues of discriminant and incremental validity - is Trait EI independent from other well established personality constructs such as neuroticism?

EI and Databases

• Theoretically those with high EI scores should be better at identifying and labelling emotion than low EI individuals.

• EI has yet to be examined in work on emotion databases.

• The relationship between EI and databases is a two way process:

- Emotion databases as tools in EI research.

- EI differences used to distinguish between effective and not so effective labellers.

Databases as a Research Tool for EI

• EI research faces a serious psychometric challenge – how to objectify emotion.

• EI ability tests that attempt to objectively measure the subjective experience of emotion are required.

• This is particularly important for aspects of ability EI concerned with internal emotional states that are only available to the individual, e.g. identifying emotion.

• At present the sub-tests from the MSCEIT sub-scale, “Identifying Emotion” use artificial items such as photographs of 6 basic facial expressions.

EI and Labelling Databases

• A valid, reliable database should take into account individual differences in EI, particularly when labelling emotional content of stimuli.

• But first must identify ways in which EI differences impact on databases.

Current Work

• FEELTRACE is a computer program that allows observers to track the perceived emotional content of a stimulus over time. It is used as one means of labelling audio-visual stimuli.

• Current aim is to explore any possible relationships between EI scores and responses on FEELTRACE tasks.

• Issues to be explored are:- Differences in the ability to anticipate perceived emotion in audio-visual clips.- Differences in time taken to identify transitions in emotion.

To Recap...

• EI accounts for individual differences in emotion.

• EI is both an intelligence and a personality trait.

• There are problems but doesn’t stop use of EI within HUMAINE.

• Need to research influence of EI on emotion databases.