Read the whole article to see how this relates to procrastination.Increasing emotional intelligence, decreasing procrastination
A study published this month demonstrated that a 4-week program increased emotion identification and management. Our most recent research revealed a strong negative relation between emotional intelligence and procrastination. This may be a new avenue for procrastination intervention.
My blog today brings together two studies. The first was recently published by Belgian colleagues in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. In this study, they demonstrated that emotional intelligence can be enhanced with a short, empirically-derived training program. The second study is one from my own research group conducted by Eric Heward. Eric has been studying the relation between emotional intelligence and procrastination; a study we'll be presenting at the 6th Biennial Conference on Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings this summer. I present a little about each of these studies and conclude with some thoughts about how we might best manage procrastination from an emotional intelligence perspective.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to an individual difference in the perception, processing, regulation and utilization of emotional information. It's a construct that captures emotional competencies. These individual differences have been conceived of as knowledge, abilities and traits. I won't get into these distinctions here except to say that EI includes: what we know about emotions (our own and others'), what we can do with this knowledge (e.g., strategies for managing emotions), and how typical it is for us to act in an emotionally intelligent fashion (a trait perspective).The most important thing about EI no matter how it's construed is that it is related to a variety of measures of well-being, quality of life, occupational success, health and relationship quality. EI is an essential ingredient of life success and happiness.
Increasing Emotional Intelligence
Four colleagues from Belgium (Delphine Nelis, Jordi Quoidbach, Moira Mikolajczak & Michel Hansenne) collaborated on an interesting intervention study. They enlisted the participation of 37 psychology students (average age 20.5 years), and assigned them randomly to one of two conditions: 1) Training group (15 men, 4 women) who received a 4-week program designed to increase their EI (and they completed a battery of questionnaires), and 2) Control group (15 women, 3 men) who simply completed the questionnaires. The questionnaire package was administered 3 times: 1) prior to the 1st session, 2) at the end of the 4th session for the training group, and 3) 6 months later (post-training follow-up). The questionnaires included measures of emotion regulation, regulation of others' emotions, emotion identification and emotional understanding.The EI training intervention consisted of 4 sessions of 2.5 hours each over 4 weeks with participants divided into two smaller groups (10 and 9 participants, respectively). The training was based on Mayer and Salovey's model of EI, with an emphasis on: 1) perception, appraisal and expression of emotion; 2) emotional facilitation of thinking; 3) understanding and analyzing emotions; 4) reflective regulation of emotion. During the program, particular emphasis was placed on techniques to enhance emotional regulation and emotional understanding. These sessions were based on short lectures, role plays, discussions and readings. Participants also completed a daily dairy of emotional experience that they analyzed in light of the theory explained in class as part of their learning.
Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
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Thursday, April 16, 2009
Timothy A. Pychyl - Increasing emotional intelligence, decreasing procrastination
A great article on emotional intelligence from the Psychology Today blogs.
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