The roles of ability emotional intelligence in predicting affective decision-making.

Background: Decision-making is integral to navigating everyday life, and understanding the cognitive and emotional factors influencing affective decision-making is crucial.

Methods: In this study, 149 participants completed the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) to measure ability emotional intelligence, a N-back working memory task, and three affective decision-making tasks: the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), and Columbia Card Task (CCT).

Results: The results revealed that understanding emotions, a domain of emotional intelligence, was a significant predictor of superior decision-making on both the IGT and CCT, even after controlling for working memory abilities. This finding suggests that the relationship between understanding emotions and affective decision-making is not merely a reflection of general cognitive abilities, but rather highlights the unique contribution of emotional understanding to strategic decision-making in emotionally charged contexts. However, emotional intelligence was not significantly associated with BART performance.

Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of understanding emotions in strategic decision-making and open avenues for future research to investigate whether training ability emotional intelligence can improve affective decision-making tasks and yield meaningful benefits in real-world contexts.