Attuned to the Flux of Life: Relations Between Ability Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Reactivity

The field of ability-related emotional intelligence (ability EI) could benefit from new perspectives concerning dynamic operations. According to a recent perspective, variations in ability EI are likely to be linked to variations in skills related to evaluation. This perspective contends, perhaps counterintuitively, that higher levels of ability EI are likely to be linked to higher levels of emotional reactivity, defined in terms of stronger event-emotion relationships. Two studies (total N = 245) pursue such ideas in the context of multilevel models involving event valence and emotional experience. Variations in ability EI modulated event-emotion relationships in the context of laboratory inductions involving hypothetical events (Study 1), affective images varying in valence (Study 1), and with respect to naturally occurring variations in positive and negative daily events (Study 2), such that higher levels of ability EI were linked to stronger event-emotion relationships, regardless of whether events and emotions were positive or negative in valence. These results provide new evidence for recent theorizing concerning ability EI while speaking to functional versus dysfunctional perspectives on emotional reactivity.