Emotion regulation efficacy beliefs: The outsized impact of base rates.

To regulate others' emotions effectively we must learn about the efficacy of our regulation attempts. Deciding whether we made someone else feel better involves a causal judgment about the effect of our intervention on their emotional state. The current study examined whether, like other causal judgments, beliefs about emotion regulation efficacy are disproportionately affected by base rates. In two experiments, we showed that participants' perceived efficacy at helping a target regulate their emotions was more influenced by the target's average emotion levels than the relative effect of regulating versus not regulating the target's emotion. This led participants to conclude that they were helpful both when they were not (Experiment 1) and even when they made the target feel worse (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that our beliefs about the effectiveness of other-directed emotion regulation are notably biased by the average level of emotion expressed by the regulation target. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Do Judgments of Learning Impair Recall When Uninformative Cues Are Salient?

Judgments of learning (JOL) are one of the most commonly used measures of metamemory. There is mixed evidence that eliciting JOLs while participants are studying word pairs influences their subsequent recall, a phenomenon known as reactivity. The majority of studies have found that positive reactivity occurs when word pairs are related. This finding suggests that when the final test is sensitive to the cues used to make a JOL (e.g., pair relatedness), a benefit to recall is observed. Here, in three experiments, JOL reactivity is examined in the presence of a salient, yet non-diagnostic cue-font size. The results show that when study time is limited and font size is made salient, eliciting JOLs impairs future recall. It is argued that JOLs prompt participants to evaluate salient cues in the learning environment to evaluate whether they will affect future recall. This increased processing of salient cues can impair recall if it comes at the expense of processing less salient but more informative cues. These findings suggest that the relevance to the test of the cues processed when JOLs are performed determines the direction of reactivity effects, with both positive and negative reactivity being possible depending on how diagnostic the salient metacognitive cues are for recall.

Lower Avoidant Coping Mediates the Relationship of Emotional Intelligence With Well-Being and Ill-Being.

Emotional intelligence (EI) abilities relate to desirable outcomes such as better well-being, academic performance, and job performance. Previous research shows that coping strategies mediate the effects of ability EI on such outcomes. Across two cross-sectional studies, we show that coping strategies mediate the relationships of ability EI with both well-being (life satisfaction, psychological well-being) and ill-being (depression, anxiety, stress). Study 1 (N = 105 first-year university students, 78% female) assessed EI with the Situational Test of Emotion Understanding (STEU) and Situation Test of Emotion Management (STEM). Avoidant coping significantly mediated the relationship of both the STEU and STEM with depression, anxiety, stress, and psychological well-being. EI was associated with lower avoidant coping, higher well-being and lower ill-being. Study 2 (N = 115 first-year university students, 67% female) assessed EI with the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). Avoidant coping mediated the relationship between EI and ill-being, but not the relationship between EI and well-being. These effects were significant for three of the four EI branches-emotion perception, understanding, and management. We discuss possible reasons why avoidant coping may be an active ingredient by which lower EI relates to lower well-being. We also discuss a possible application of our findings-that EI training programs might benefit from including content aimed at reducing avoidant coping.

Emotionally intelligent people show more flexible regulation of emotions in daily life.

Emotion regulation strategies have been characterized as adaptive or maladaptive; however, the ability to switch strategies to best suit the situation (regulatory flexibility and adaptability) underlies effective emotion regulation. Emotional intelligence may be a key capacity that enables flexible emotion regulation. We use experience sampling data from 165 participants to test whether emotional intelligence abilities (emotion understanding and management) predict variability in four emotion regulation strategies. Results show that both the emotion understanding and emotion management branches of emotional intelligence significantly relate to between-strategy variability (with moderate effect sizes), but only emotion understanding significantly predicts within-strategy variability. These findings support the hypothesis that emotional intelligence is an important predictor of the ability to flexibly vary emotion regulation depending on the situation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Causal illusions in the classroom: how the distribution of student outcomes can promote false instructional beliefs.

Teachers sometimes believe in the efficacy of instructional practices that have little empirical support. These beliefs have proven difficult to efface despite strong challenges to their evidentiary basis. Teachers typically develop causal beliefs about the efficacy of instructional practices by inferring their effect on students' academic performance. Here, we evaluate whether causal inferences about instructional practices are susceptible to an outcome density effect using a contingency learning task. In a series of six experiments, participants were ostensibly presented with students' assessment outcomes, some of whom had supposedly received teaching via a novel technique and some of whom supposedly received ordinary instruction. The distributions of the assessment outcomes was manipulated to either have frequent positive outcomes (high outcome density condition) or infrequent positive outcomes (low outcome density condition). For both continuous and categorical assessment outcomes, participants in the high outcome density condition rated the novel instructional technique as effective, despite the fact that it either had no effect or had a negative effect on outcomes, while the participants in the low outcome density condition did not. These results suggest that when base rates of performance are high, participants may be particularly susceptible to drawing inaccurate inferences about the efficacy of instructional practices.

The Confidence Database.

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages. Each dataset is accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (which is available at https://osf.io/s46pr/) contained 145 datasets with data from more than 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. Here we show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimations of several foundational confidence-related effects.

Emotional intelligence predicts academic performance: A meta-analysis.

Schools and universities devote considerable time and resources to developing students' social and emotional skills, such as emotional intelligence (EI). The goals of such programs are partly for personal development but partly to increase academic performance. The current meta-analysis examines the degree to which student EI is associated with academic performance. We found an overall effect of ρ = .20 using robust variance estimation (N = 42,529, k = 1,246 from 158 citations). The association is significantly stronger for ability EI (ρ = .24, k = 50) compared with self-rated (ρ = .12, k = 33) or mixed EI (ρ = .19, k = 90). Ability, self-rated, and mixed EI explained an additional 1.7%, 0.7%, and 2.3% of the variance, respectively, after controlling for intelligence and big five personality. Understanding and management branches of ability EI explained an additional 3.9% and 3.6%, respectively. Relative importance analysis suggests that EI is the third most important predictor for all three streams, after intelligence and conscientiousness. Moderators of the effect differed across the three EI streams. Ability EI was a stronger predictor of performance in humanities than science. Self-rated EI was a stronger predictor of grades than standardized test scores. We propose that three mechanisms underlie the EI/academic performance link: (a) regulating academic emotions, (b) building social relationships at school, and (c) academic content overlap with EI. Different streams of EI may affect performance through different mechanisms. We note some limitations, including the lack of evidence for a causal direction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Reactivity to Measures of Metacognition.

Metacognition is typically measured by collecting self-reported information from participants while they complete a cognitive task. Recent evidence suggests that eliciting such metacognitive information from participants can impact both their metacognitive processes and their cognitive performance. Although there are contradictory findings regarding the magnitude and even the direction of this effect, recent evidence has converged to provide a clearer picture of the mechanisms that determine reactivity. Here, we provide a review of the evidence that measures of metacognition, namely think-aloud protocols, judgments of learning, and confidence ratings, are reactive. We argue that reactivity has important implications not just for the measurement of metacognition, but for metacognition theorizing because reactivity can provide insights into the cues participants use to monitor their performance. Drawing from this synthesis of evidence, we propose a tentative framework for studying reactivity that integrates cue processing accounts of reactivity with existing models of metacognition. We conclude the review by addressing some of the pertinent questions yet to be comprehensively addressed by reactivity research, including how researchers should best address issues of reactivity when using experimental designs.

Do confidence ratings prime confidence?

Confidence ratings (CR) are one of the most frequently used measures in psychological research. However, recent evidence has suggested that eliciting CR from participants may result in changes to cognitive performance, so called reactivity. Here, we examine whether reactivity to CR can be better explained by added task-relevant introspection, or, alternatively, the unintentional priming of confidence-related beliefs. First, we compare participants' performance in a group making CR with a group making a task-irrelevant control rating, and a second group who made the same task-irrelevant rating, but with the word 'confident' included in the rating's wording. The results suggest that reactivity is driven by the presentation of the word 'confident', and reactivity does not require task-relevant introspection. Additionally, we show that rephrasing CR to remove the word 'confident' neutralises reactivity. This suggests that reactivity may represent a significant problem for researchers using CR, but rephrasing CR may remedy these concerns in relatively simple fashion.

A meta-analysis and systematic review of reactivity to judgements of learning.

Judgements of learning (JoL) are often used in memory research as a means for assessing an individual's metacognitive beliefs about their learning. JoL have been shown to reliably predict performance as well as learning behaviours and decisions . Participants may, however, modify their behaviour in response to performing JoL. There has, however, been little consensus as to the reliability and direction of the effect. We report on a meta-analyses that assesses the evidence that memory performance is reactive to JoL. The results indicate that overall providing JoL does not have a significant effect on memory performance (g = 0.054, 95% CI -0.027 to 0.135). However, sub-groups analysis showed that this effect depends on the nature of the stimuli to be recalled, with moderate positive reactivity observed for related word pairs (g = 0.323, 95% CI 0.083 to 0.563) and word lists (g = 0.384, 95% CI 0.146 to 0.622) but no reactivity when pairs were unrelated or a mixture of related and unrelated pairs. These results indicate that researchers should be aware that eliciting JoL may well influence participants' underlying encoding processes, especially when using related word pairs or word lists.