Knowing is half the battle: Regulating and appraising emotions co-protect from suicidal ideation.

College students, particularly those in healthcare fields, face an elevated risk of suicidal ideation and depression. Therefore, it is essential to explore how both actual and perceived emotional resources may play a role in suicide prevention within this age group. This study examined (1) whether actual self-focused emotion-regulation ability diminishes suicidal ideation through a decrease in depressive symptoms, and (2) whether perceived self-emotion appraisal moderates this relationship. In 312 healthcare students (209 women) actual self-focused emotion-regulation ability was negatively related to suicidal ideation through depressive symptoms. Furthermore, perceived self-emotion appraisal buffered the relationship between depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation. Findings suggest that perceived self-emotion appraisal may reinforce the adaptiveness of actual self-focused emotion-regulation ability as a protective factor for psychological maladjustment. The results indicate the collaborative ability to regulate one's emotions coupled with the self-perception of emotion appraisal could effectively alleviate the potential progression of emotional difficulties among healthcare students.

Overlap Between the General Factor of Personality and Trait Emotional Intelligence: A Genetic Correlation Study.

A previous meta-analysis (Van der Linden et al., Psychol Bull 143:36-52, 2017) showed that the General Factor of Personality (GFP) overlaps with ability as well as trait emotional intelligence (EI). The correlation between trait EI and the GFP was so high (ρ = 0.88) in that meta-analysis that these two may be considered virtually identical constructs. The present study builds on these findings by examining whether the strong phenotypic correlation between the GFP and trait EI has a genetic component. In a sample of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, the heritability estimates for the GFP and trait EI were 53 and 45%, respectively. Moreover, there was a strong genetic correlation of r = .90 between the GFP and trait EI. Additional analyses suggested that a substantial proportion of the genetic correlations reflects non-additive genetic effects (e.g., dominance and epistasis). These findings are discussed in light of evolutionary accounts of the GFP.

The consequences of self- and other-focused emotional intelligence: Not all sunshine and roses.

Emotional intelligence (EI) contributes to good performance and well-being in jobs that involve frequent interpersonal contact. However, as EI is composed of self- and other-focused dimensions, it remains unclear which dimensions are responsible for better performance and well-being. We hypothesized that other-focused EI dimensions in particular relate to task performance, whereas self-focused EI dimensions relate to employees' subjective stress and physiological responses to emotional job demands. We asked Dutch secretaries (N = 110) to professionally respond to five emotionally demanding work-related phone calls. The secretaries' skin conductance levels were recorded during the calls, and the secretaries had to indicate their stress levels after each call. Two independent raters coded the secretaries' effectiveness and the number of emotion regulation attempts during the phone calls. The results showed that other-focused emotion regulation was positively related to only one of the task performance indicators during three phone calls. In line with the hypotheses, self-focused emotion appraisal was negatively related to the secretaries' subjective stress levels after all the phone calls. Self-focused emotion regulation was positively related to the secretaries' skin conductance levels during all but one of the phone calls. This outcome suggests that self-focused EI dimensions decrease the subjective experience of stress but are accompanied by physiological costs, whereas other-focused emotion regulation may be positively but weakly related to task performance in emotionally demanding contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Overlap between the general factor of personality and emotional intelligence: A meta-analysis.

We examine the relationship between the general factor of personality (GFP) and emotional intelligence (EI) and specifically test the hypothesis that the GFP is a social effectiveness factor overlapping conceptually with EI. Presented is an extensive meta-analysis in which the associations between the GFP, extracted from the Big Five dimensions, with various EI measures is examined. Based on a total sample of k = 142 data sources (N = 36,268) the 2 major findings from the meta-analysis were (a) a large overlap between the GFP and trait EI (r ≈ .85); and (b) a positive, but more moderate, correlation with ability EI (r ≈ .28). These findings show that high-GFP individuals score higher on trait and ability EI, supporting the notion that the GFP is a social effectiveness factor. The findings also suggest that the GFP is very similar, perhaps even synonymous, to trait EI. (PsycINFO Database Record