Bipolar or Independent? Relations Between Positive and Negative Affect Vary by Emotional Intelligence
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Bipolar or Independent? Relations Between Positive and Negative Affect Vary by Emotional Intelligence Michael D. Robinson 1
&
Roberta L. Irvin 1 & Michelle R. Persich 2 & Sukumarakurup Krishnakumar 3
Received: 29 April 2020 / Accepted: 13 September 2020 # The Society for Affective Science 2020
Abstract Individuals who are intelligent concerning their emotions should experience them differently. In particular, being conversant with the valence dimension that is key to emotions should reasonably result in emotional experiences that are more bipolar with respect to this dimension. Pursuant of these ideas, three studies (total N = 335) assessed emotional intelligence in ability-related terms (ability EI). The same participants also reported on their recent experiences of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) at work (studies 1 and 2) and/or their day-to-day emotional experiences within a daily diary protocol (study 3). Within each of these studies, ability EI moderated the relationship between experiences of PA and NA, such that the PA-NA relationship was more bipolar at higher levels of EI. These findings are discussed with respect to their implications for debates about bipolarity as well as for their value in highlighting ways in which the ability EI dimension operates. Keywords Emotional intelligence . Ability . Positive affect . Negative affect . Bipolarity
Individuals are thought to differ in their abilities to perceive, understand, and manage emotions, which is a construct termed emotional intelligence (EI). This construct was formally proposed in 1990, popularized in 1995, and redefined in 1997, as briefly reviewed by Barchard, Brackett, and Mestre (2016). In this area of scholarship and research, it is important to distinguish ability-related perspectives on EI (ability EI) from trait-related perspectives (trait EI), both because the two sorts of measures (performance-based versus self-reported) do not correlate highly with each other and because the correlates of each sort of approach are quite different (Joseph & Newman, 2010). In the present research, we are concerned with ability EI rather than trait EI. There are several tests of ability EI and the reliability of these tests tends to be sufficient when total scores are used (Palmer, Gignac, Manocha, & Stough, 2005). However, evaluations of whether such individual differences matter (i.e., Handling Editor: Alicia Grandey * Michael D. Robinson [email protected] 1
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA
2
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
3
Keck Graduate Institute, Claremont, CA, USA
predict anything) have been quite discrepant. As is wellknown, Goleman (1995) claimed that emotional intelligence was more important than cognitive ability in facilitating success in school, at work, and in one’s relationships, but these claims were clearly overstated (Ybarra, Kross, & SanchezBurks, 2014). Conversely, critics have stated that the evidence in favor of the importance of ability EI is surprisingly sparse if
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