Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and
Dissertations
2019
Emotion socialization and psychological distress:
The mediating roles of emotion recognition and
emotion regulation
Madelyne Losby
Iowa State University
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Recommended Citation
Losby, Madelyne, “Emotion socialization and psychological distress: The mediating roles of emotion recognition and emotion
regulation” (2019). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 17045.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/17045
Emotion socialization and psychological distress: The mediating roles of emotion
recognition and emotion regulation
by
Madelyne M. Losby
A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE
Major: Psychology
Program of Study Committee:
Monica Marsee, Co-major Professor
David Vogel, Co-major Professor
Douglas Gentile
The student author, whose presentation of the scholarship herein was approved by the
program of study committee, is solely responsible for the content of this thesis. The
Graduate College will ensure this thesis is globally accessible and will not permit
alterations after a degree is conferred.
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa
2019
Copyright © Madelyne M. Losby, 2019. All rights reserved.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………………………………………………………………….. iv
LIST OF TABLES
……………………………………………………………………………………………….. v
ABSTRACT
……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. vi
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………………… 1
Emotion Socialization, Emotional Intelligence, and Distress ………………………………… 2
CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW …………………………………………………………………. 4
Emotion Socialization
………………………………………………………………………………………. 4
Socialization Strategies ……………………………………………………………………………….. 7
Supportive Strategies. …………………………………………………………………………….. 7
Non-Supportive Strategies. ……………………………………………………………………… 8
Socialization and Distress
…………………………………………………………………………………. 9
Emotional Intelligence
……………………………………………………………………………………. 11
Functions.
……………………………………………………………………………………………. 13
Forms. ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 14
Emotion Recognition. …………………………………………………………………………… 15
Emotion Recognition and Distress.
…………………………………………………………. 17
Emotion Regulation. …………………………………………………………………………….. 18
Emotion Regulation and Distress.
…………………………………………………………… 21
Emotion Socialization and Emotional Intelligence …………………………………………….. 22
Emerging Adults……………………………………………………………………………………….. 24
Current Study
………………………………………………………………………………………………… 25
Hypotheses ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 25
Directional Hypothesis.
…………………………………………………………………………. 25
Mediation Hypothesis. ………………………………………………………………………….. 26
CHAPTER 3. METHODS …………………………………………………………………………………… 27
Participants …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 27
Procedures ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 28
Measures
………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 30
Emotion Socialization ……………………………………………………………………………….. 30
Emotional Intelligence ………………………………………………………………………………. 31
Emotion Recognition. …………………………………………………………………………… 32
Emotion Regulation. …………………………………………………………………………….. 33
Psychological Distress
……………………………………………………………………………….. 34
iii
CHAPTER 4. RESULTS …………………………………………………………………………………….. 35
Data Preparation and Cleaning ………………………………………………………………………… 35
Preliminary Analyses
……………………………………………………………………………………… 36
Descriptive Statistics …………………………………………………………………………………. 36
Model Analyses …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 37
CHAPTER 5. DISCUSSION
……………………………………………………………………………….. 42
Limitations and Future Directions
……………………………………………………………………. 46
Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 51
REFERENCES ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 52
iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Page
Figure 1.1 Conceptual Model of variables
…………………………………………………………….. 3
Figure 2.1 Supportive Strategies Model. …………………………………………………………….. 26
Figure 2.2 Non-Supportive Strategies Model. ……………………………………………………… 26
Figure 3.1 Supportive Strategies Model. …………………………………………………………….. 38
Figure 3.2 Non-Supportive Strategies Model. ……………………………………………………… 40
v
LIST OF TABLES
Page
Table 1
Racial and Ethnic Group Identification
……………………………………………….. 28
Table 2
Sample Means, Standard Deviations, and Ranges of Study Measures. ……. 26
Table 3
Zero-Order Correlations and Alpha Coefficients of Study Measures. ……… 26
Table 4
Mediation Model of Supportive Strategies.
………………………………………….. 38
Table 5
Mediation Model of Non-Supportive Strategies. ………………………………….. 40
vi
ABSTRACT
The strategies parents use when responding to their child’s emotions, particularly
negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness, have been shown to be associated
with distress later in life. In addition, both supportive and non-supportive strategies, have
been correlated with emotional development, particularly emotion recognition and
emotion regulation. These processes comprise, emotional intelligence, which has been
linked to psychological distress. Much of the research in this area has been done with
children, predominantly preschoolers, and as such, research is needed with older
populations, particularly emerging adults (ages 18 to 29), who are within a developmental
period where psychological distress is more prevalent. As such, the current study asked
emerging adults (N = 497) to retrospectively examine the way their parents responded to
their negative emotions, and assessed current symptoms related to psychological distress,
as well as emotional intelligence (i.e., emotion recognition and emotion regulation). Path
analyses were conducted using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) to explore two parallel
mediation models in which emotion recognition and emotion regulation mediated the
association between both supportive socialization strategies and non-supportive
socialization strategies and psychological distress. The current results support a partial
mediation between emotion socialization and distress through emotion recognition and
emotion regulation. Importance is derived from the novelty of the study, evidence for the
conceptual model, and intervention implications for clinicians with clients. Limitations
and future directions are discussed.
1
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
There was an acclaimed movie from 2015, Inside Out, that gave an inside look of the
mind of a girl named Riley. The movie uses the personification of emotions to convey what
emotions are, how to recognize them within ourselves, and the impact of our ability to
regulate emotions. The way in which people recognize and regulate emotions is a key aspect
researched and is commonly referred to as emotional intelligence (Mayer, Salovey, &
Caruso, 2002; MacCann & Roberts, 2008). Such abilities are learned in family and social
contexts and can thus be negatively affected by problems with attachment, emotional
expressiveness, and general parenting styles (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson,
2007; Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014). Research in developmental psychology is devoted to
this topic, in particular, examining parental practices such as supportive and non-supportive
emotion socialization strategies and their association with psychological distress in youth
(Eisenberg et al., 1999; Johnson, Hawes, Eisenberg, Kohlhoff, & Dudensy, 2017; Klimes-
Dougan, 2007; Teo, Raval, & Jansari, 2017; Rodas, Chavira, & Baker, 2017). Consistent
with this, emotion socialization has been linked to the development of emotional intelligence
(i.e., recognizing and regulating emotions; Brackett, Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner, & Salovey,
2006; Kafetsios, 2004; Zeidner, Roberts, & Matthews, 2002; Zimmermann & Iwanski,
2014). However, much of this work has been done with early childhood samples. In
particular, one study examined a mediation model where emotional competence (or
emotional intelligence) mediates the relationship between socialization strategies and
adjustment outcomes with preschoolers (Mirabile, 2010). However, the role of these
variables (see Figure 1.1) may be especially important for emerging adults (ages 18-29), who
are at a time when many of them are moving away from their parents for the first time, and
2
now they are practicing their skills of emotional intelligence (Hamdi & Iacono, 2014;
Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014). The goal of this research is to fill these gaps in the literature
by examining the potential role of emotional intelligence in the association between the
socialization process and psychological symptoms in emerging adults.
Emotion Socialization, Emotional Intelligence, and Distress
Emotion socialization, or the strategies used by parents when responding to their
child’s emotions (i.e., rewarding, punishing, overriding, neglecting and magnifying; Klimes-
Dougan et al., 2007), has been found to be linked to their children’s adjustment (Eisenberg et
al., 1999; Johnson, Hawes, Eisenberg, Kohlhoff, & Dudensy, 2017; Teo, Raval, & Jansari,
2017). Research has found that the unsupportive strategies (i.e., punishing, neglecting, and
overriding) in response to negative emotions (anger, fear, and sadness) have the strongest
relationship to adjustment (Eisenberg et al., 1999; Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007). One study
retroactively examined young adults’ perceptions of their emotion socialization from their
parents and found that parents’ use of punishing and neglecting strategies with negative
emotions was positively correlated with self-reported psychological distress (Garside &
Klimes-Dougan, 2002). The strategies of punishment, neglect, and magnification when used
in response to anger are reported more in youth with internalizing and externalizing problems
and the strategy of reward when used with fear, anger, and sadness are reported more in
youth without these problems (Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007).
Researchers have found that parental emotion socialization is linked to a child’s
developing ability of the specific skill called emotion regulation (Bariola, Gullone, &
Hughes, 2011; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998), as well as their ability to recognize
different emotions (McElwain, Halberstadt, & Volling, 2007). Both emotion regulation and
emotion recognition are components of overall emotional intelligence (Mayer, Salovey, &
3
Caruso, 2002; MacCann & Roberts, 2008). Researchers have found that emotional
intelligence is associated with social functioning and adjustment (e.g., Ciarrochi, Heaven &
Supavadeeprasit, 2008; Elfenbein, Marsh, & Ambady, 2002; Gross & John, 2003). For
example, existing research has found that EI modestly predicts lower states of depression,
anxiety, and stress, with correlations in the .10 to .30 range (MacCann & Roberts, 2008), and
low emotion recognition correlates to higher rates of depression (Taylor & Bagby, 2004).
Whereas the correlations between variables have been established (Mirabile, 2010),
the influence of emotional socialization on psychological distress through emotional
intelligence has not been thoroughly examined. For example, when parents punish their
child’s experience of sadness, the children may not learn how to recognize and regulate their
sadness in the future. This could impact psychological distress later in life, in the form of
symptoms of depression, anxiety, etc. As such, there is a need to address the gap in the
literature by examining the potential mediating role of the development of the skill of
emotional intelligence on emotion socialization and psychological distress for emerging
adults. Figure 1.1 depicts the conceptual model guiding the current study, and a more specific
model (that discuss two distinct types of emotional intelligence mediators: emotion
recognition, and emotion regulation) will be presented in the next section.
Figure 1.1 Conceptual Model of variables
4
CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW
The goal of this research project is to examine the potential mediating role of
emotional intelligence in the association between emotion socialization and psychological
distress in emerging adults. First is the construct of emotion socialization and its link to
psychological distress. The next section describes in detail emotional intelligence and its
potential mediating role of the link between emotion socialization and psychological distress.
I will also discuss the important phase of life emerging adulthood (ages 18-29) where these
emotional processes may be particularly salient. Lastly, I will describe my hypotheses.
Emotion Socialization
Emotion socialization is defined as the process of “teaching children about the
emotion itself, its causes, consequences, its expression and regulation” (Eisenberg,
Cumberland & Spinrad, 1998, p. 245). In other words, emotion socialization includes the
behaviors parents use to orient and model emotions for their children. Studies examining the
beginning of the socialization process have found that infants begin recognizing and
understanding emotions by imitating their parents’ facial expressions as early as 2.5 months
old (Malatesta, Grigoryev, Lamb, Albin, & Culver, 1986). For example, Malatesta et al.
followed 111 infants and their mothers from ages 2.5 months to 7.5 months. The researchers
measured emotion socialization as the degree to which the infant imitated the mother’s facial
expressions (i.e., interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, ‘knit brow’, and pain; [consistent with
Ekman, 1969]). There were differences across age, with infants displaying a decrease in
negative emotions versus an increase in positive emotions over the course of the study. The
imitation patterns suggest the start of emotion socialization occurs with observational
learning and conditioning of facial expressions of emotions in infants (Malatesta et al., 1986).
5
Researchers have been discussing the ways that parents may be influencing their
child’s emotional development for more than 30 years. One key theory is Meta-emotional
theory (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996) which describes the theoretical pathways through
which parents and children interact in ways that influence the child’s emotional development
and outcomes. These pathways include both cognitive and behavioral components and the
theory suggests that parenting strategies and responses to child emotions are predicted by
cognitive processes, conscious or not, embedded within parents’ meta-emotion philosophy.
Parental socialization processes, both intentional and unintentional, are likely to impact the
child’s emotional development (Denham, Bassett, & Wyatt, 2007). For example, using a
semi-structured interview with 56 families, Gottman, Katz, & Hooven (1996) asked the
parents about their own emotional experiences, and their philosophy around emotional
expression. Specifically, conscious feelings, attitudes and behaviors about their child’s anger
and sadness were identified. Gottman and colleagues (1996) found that positive parent
behaviors (e.g., being aware of and talking about emotions when the child is upset or
coaching the child to soothe him or herself) were positively associated with both child
outcomes and children’s ability to regulate emotions. Outcomes included child academic
achievement (e.g., math, reading recognition and comprehension and child-peer interactions),
and fewer behavior problems like hyperactivity, anti-social behaviors, hostility, and
aggression (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996). Children’s emotion regulation was measured
by an uncommon measure that asked parents about the instances in which they had to down
regulate the child to reduce the child’s level of activity (Katz & Gottman, 1986). Gottman and
colleagues measured parenting (e.g. warmth and scaffolding-praising), which includes
structured, responsive, and affectionate behaviors. For example, a parent with an
6
authoritative parenting style would provide their child with directions beforehand and wait
until the child did something right to enthusiastically praise them.
Around the same time as Gottman’s Meta-Emotional theory, other researchers have
also discussed the importance of parenting factors on children’s emotional development
(while Gottman uses the term scaffolding-praising, and Eisenberg uses the term coaching).
Most notably, Nancy Eisenberg suggested that certain family factors (e.g., discussion of
emotion; emotion expressiveness within the family) and, specifically, parental reactions to
children’s emotions play a huge role in their child’s emotional development (Eisenberg,
Cumberland & Spinrad, 1998). When children have emotional reactions to day-to-day events
(e.g., car rides, getting ready for bed) and more stressful situations (e.g., car accidents, death
in the family), the socialization occurs when the parents respond to their child’s emotions.
Such discussions naturally involve labeling the emotion and describing the situation that
caused the emotion (Denham, Mitchell-Copeland, Strandberg, Auerbach, & Blair, 1997).
These discussions have an impact on how children build their understanding of emotions,
both within themselves and of others, and help build an appropriate way to regulate their own
emotions (e.g., which emotions should be expressed or not, and when; Fabbes et al., 2002;
Gottman, Katz, & Hoover, 1997). Conversely, parents who over or under express emotions
themselves and utilize more extreme socialization strategies impact their child’s emotional
development negatively, so that when children are in emotional situations, they use emotion
dysregulation (discussed in detail later) instead of emotion regulation (Denham et al., 1997).
Even though parents’ responses to children’s emotions may be part of their general
parenting style, all emotion-related parenting behaviors are typically thought of as part of
emotion socialization (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Sessa, Avenevoli, & Essex, 2002).
7
Researchers have started to expand upon the types of parental reactions to their children’s
emotions by distinguishing between supportive and non-supportive strategies (Fabes, Poulin,
Eisenberg, & Madden-Derdich, 2002).
Socialization Strategies
While researchers tend to use differing nomenclature, the general literature suggests
that parental responses to emotions of their children can be categorized in terms of supportive
and non-supportive socialization strategies (Fabes et al., 2002; Guo, Mrug, & Knight, 2017).
Supportive Strategies. Supportive strategies foster healthy emotional development
through emotion and problem focused strategies and encouraging the expression of emotions
(Eisenberg, Cumberland & Spinrad, 1998). Specifically, researchers have studied strategies
such as rewarding (such as providing comfort and empathizing) and magnifying (matching
the expression of the child) emotions (Cunningham, Kliewer, & Garner, 2009; Eisenberg et
al. 1996; Kliewer, Fearnow, & Miller, 1996; Magai, 1996; Miller-Slough, Zeman, Poon, &
Sanders, 2016). For example, a rewarding strategy would be when a parent asks what’s
wrong, and helps you deal with the situation and a magnifying strategy would be a parent
becoming sad themselves when a child expresses sadness (Klimes-Dougan, 2002). In a study
with 117 dyads (mostly mothers and their child ages 8-11), researchers measured their
emotion socialization using a discussion task, including both the children and the mothers
and found that mothers’ supportive emotion socialization, (e.g. rewarding responses that
encouraged and validated the children’s emotions) were positively related to children’s
management of their own anger and sadness (Miller-Slough, Zeman, Poon, & Sanders,
2016). Similarly, Cunningham, Kliewer, and Garner (2009) found that in 69 African-
American dyads (88.6% mothers 13.4% fathers and their children, ages ranging 9-13), the
parent’s supportive strategies (e.g. rewarding and accepting their child’s emotions) lead to
8
positive outcomes (e.g., academic achievement, social skills, and internalizing and
externalizing behaviors) for their children, particularly for boys. In particular, these
supportive strategies led to improved emotion regulation.
Non-Supportive Strategies. On the other hand, non-supportive strategies are
contingent reactions that do not foster healthy emotional development by restricting
emotional expression either through punishing or expressing disapproval of or even ignoring
their child’s expression of emotions (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). Some
researchers have been using the terminology “punitive and minimizing” (i.e., Denham et al.,
1997), while others have addressed the non-supportive strategies as “punishing, overriding,
and neglecting” (i.e., Magai, 1996). Punish, for example, would be when a parent expresses
disapproval or makes fun of a child when the child expresses an emotion. Punishing
strategies also include an actual punishment. The next strategy would be when a parent
overrides their child’s emotions by being dismissive, telling a child who expresses sadness to
cheer up, or buying a present for the child. Finally, a neglectful strategy would include
parental behaviors that ignore a child’s expression of emotion or the child identifies that their
parent usually does not notice. Studies that have found that the non-supportive strategies
parents use when responding particularly to their child’s negative emotions (like sadness,
fear, and anger) have lifelong implications for the child’s emotional development (Chaplin,
Cole, & Zahn-Waxler, 2005; Fabes, Leonard, Kupanoff, & Martin, 2001; McElwain,
Halberstadt, & Volling, 2007). Punishing and minimizing strategies foster emotion
suppression in children, however theoretically the external displays of emotion are
suppressed, but not always the internal experiences of negative emotions (Richards & Gross,
2000). This dampens the potential for emotion understanding (Denham, et al., 1997).
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Taken together, supportive and non-supportive strategies have been explained by five
main strategies that parents commonly use to socialize their children’s emotions (Malatesta-
Magai, 1991). As discussed above, they are: reward, punish, override, neglect and magnify
(Magai, 1996). Importantly, Magai also found that it may not be as simple as whether a
strategy is ‘supportive or not’; the implications depend upon the specific emotion used with
each strategy. For example, magnification of anger has different outcomes than
magnification of happiness. An example of magnification of anger would be a parent yelling
back at the child while magnification of happiness would be parents becoming happy
themselves (Magai, 1996). Some studies have found this to be true for positive and not
negative emotions. There are also some discrepancies around the emphasis on the type of
emotion, some being labeled as “negative” (Denham et al., 1997; Eisenberg, Fabes,
Shephard, Murphy & Reiser, 1999; Suveg & Zeman, 2004), or positive. There are
implications for each strategy when used with the universal emotions, for example,
magnification of anger has different outcomes than magnification of happiness.
Socialization and Distress
As noted in some of the research above, parent strategies impact not only the
children’s emotion development but also children’s well-being. A recent meta-analysis
compiled the research on the role that emotion socialization has on child conduct problems
with 49 studies and found “the association between parental emotion socialization behaviors
and conduct problems resulted in a small but significant negative effect size, r = − 0.08, 95%
CI [− 0.11, − 0.05], p < 0.001” (Johnson, Hawes, Eisenberg, Kohlhoff, & Dudeney, 2017, p.
70). Additionally, they found that non-supportive socialization strategies were more
predictive of conduct problems in response to negative emotions, compared to supportive
socialization strategies (Johnson et al., 2017).
10
One study longitudinally examined these negative strategies (i.e., magnification,
neglect, and punishment) of negative emotions with mothers (55 with a history of depression
and 57 without a history of depression) and their children 3- to 9-years old. Researchers
found that the mothers with depression were more likely to use non-supportive strategies
(e.g., punishing or threatening to punish the child for displaying the emotion, or failing to
attend to the child’s emotion; Silk, Shaw, Prout, O'Rourke, Lane, & Kovacs, 2011). These
children, a year later, were more likely to show internalizing symptoms (measured by the
Child Behavior Checklist; Achenbach, 1991) like depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal
(Silk et al., 2011).
In another study, Hastings and De (2008) examined both mothers’ and fathers’
reactions (n = 133) to children's anger, and found that paternal override, maternal neglect,
and both paternal and maternal magnification responses to children's emotions, in particular
sadness and fear, were correlated with many outcome variables. The children differed in their
social competence (measured with teacher’s reports of skills of interacting with peers) and
internalizing (e.g. anxiety and depression) and externalizing problems (e.g. aggressive
behaviors).
One study examined these three factors in 134 families with preschoolers (ages 3 to 4
years old) using in-home observations and interviews. Observations were coded for
children’s emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and parents’ reactions to their
child’s emotions, and families were interviewed about their experiences of emotions and
results showed that maternal positive emotions and attentiveness to their children’s emotions
predicted greater emotion knowledge in their preschoolers (Denham & Kochanoff, 2002).
Further, consistent with Gottman’s theory of meta-emotion, the experience of emotions as
11
reported by mothers was associated with subsequent attitudes towards parenting that
predicted young children’s emotion knowledge. This study provides additional evidence for
the role of both parental cognitions as well as behaviors, using both self-report and
observational measures. Given the existing literature, the current study will focus on the
relationship of the socialization strategies on three emotions (fear, sadness, and anger), on
these outcomes of psychological distress.
The path from early emotion socialization to later psychological distress is not
straightforward, which points researchers towards mediation models (Preacher & Kelley,
2011). A review of existing literature found that emotion regulation served as a mediator
between parenting practices (or emotion socialization) and adjustment (Morris, Silk,
Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007). One study examined similar variables with
preschoolers and findings “suggest that children’s maladaptive emotion regulation may
mediate the association between parents’ unsupportive direct emotion socialization and
children’s externalizing behavior” (Mirabile, 2010, p. 82). In a study of adults, researchers
examined a mediating relationship between unsupportive emotion socialization (i.e., neglect,
punish, and magnify) and depression through a mediating variable called attitudes towards
sadness (Boucher, Lecours, Philippe, & Arseneault, 2013). Building from this study, the
‘attitudes towards emotions’ have been already been identified in another body of literature
as emotional intelligence and can also lead to symptoms of distress like depression or
anxiety. Next, emotional intelligence will be described in more detail.
Emotional Intelligence
In 1983, Gardner first established the theory of multiple intelligences, which included
not only things like visual/spatial, musical, and mathematical/logical abilities but also
intrapersonal and interpersonal abilities. Building on this, the term Emotional Intelligence
12
was first described by Mayer, DiPaolo and Salovey in 1990 as the “accurate appraisal and
expression of emotions in oneself and others and the regulation of emotion in a way that
enhances living” (p. 772). The components of emotional intelligence included appraisal and
expression of emotion, regulation of emotion, and utilization of emotion (Salovey & Mayer,
1990). Since its initial discussion in the early 90s, emotional intelligence has receive
increased attention linked to number of constructs in psychology including academic
performance (Cook, Cook, & Hilton, 2016; Libbrecht, Lievens, Carette, & Côté, 2014),
leadership ability (Caruso, Mayer, & Salovey, 2002; Carter, 2013; Harms & Credé, 2010;
Kerr, Garvin, Heaton, & Boyle, 2006; Mittal & Sindhu, 2012; Saggu, 2011), satisfaction with
life (Martinez-Pons, 1997; Nelis et al., 2011), and psychological distress (Ciarrochi, Heaven
& Supavadeeprasit, 2008; Gross & Munoz, 1995; Gross & John, 2003, Gratz & Roemer,
2004; Mennin, Heimberg, Turk, & Fresco, 2002; Perez-Gonzalez, Javier Cejudo, Rodrigo-
Ruiz, Mestre, & Guil, 2015; Schultz, Izard, & Bear, 2004).
Despite the increasing number of studies examining emotional intelligence, the
literature has been split in how emotional intelligence is conceptualized and measured
(Joseph & Newman, 2010). Some researchers have focused on emotional intelligence in
terms of functions. Functions focus on the adaptive reasons why emotions assist individuals
in different situations and for different emotions (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2005). For
example, a function is to signal an individual’s motives and concerns to others and to
possible influence future actions of others (Campos, Campos, & Barrett, 1989). In turn, other
researchers have focused on emotional intelligence in terms of forms. The forms focus on the
way in which an individual enacts emotional intelligence (Matthews, Zeidner, & Roberts,
2007). For example, how an individual can identify an emotion (Holodynski & Friedlmeier,
13
2005). These conceptual differences have led to different ways of assessing emotional
intelligence. Next, I will discuss these two distinctions (functions and forms) in detail.
Functions. Much of the early work in emotional intelligence focused on assessing the
functions related to emotional intelligence based on the work of Mayer and colleagues
(1999). Mayer and colleagues developed the Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale
(MEIS) which included four dimensions (perceiving, assimilating, understanding, and
managing emotions) measured with 402 items. Specifically, the four dimensions were largely
assessing why (i.e., functions) an individual perceives, assimilates, understands, and manages
emotions in a certain way. A sample item of this is “I am able to control my temper and
handle difficulties rationally” (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002, p. 128). This measure uses
general and expert consensus scoring so that each one of a respondent’s answers is scored
against the proportion of the sample (and experts) that endorsed the same answer (Mayer,
Salovey, Caruso, & Sitarenios, 2003). “For example, if a respondent indicated that surprise
was “definitely present” in a face, and the same alternative was chosen by 45% of the
sample, the individual’s score would be incremented by the proportion, .45” (Mayer,
Salovey, Caruso, & Sitarenios, 2003, p. 100). This is similar to how g factor, or general
intelligence is scored (Legree, Psotka, Tremble, & Bourne, 2005).
While this was the first attempt to develop a measure of EI, there was some criticism
of the measure not being valid due to the consensus scoring and its complicated measurement
(i.e., too many items and too many different types of assessment). To start to address this
criticism, Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, and Sitarenios (2003) examined the factor structure of the
original MEIS scale. Using confirmatory factor analyses on a more condensed set of items,
they examined a hypothesized four-factor model (consistent with the four dimensions from
14
the literature) to one-factor and two-factor models, with a community sample of adults (N =
2,112). Their results supported the use of four factors. The factors identified were perceiving,
facilitating (previously called assimilating), understanding, and managing emotions. The four
factors mentioned were largely consistent with previous factors, although assimilating,
defined as the ability to assimilate emotions into perceptual and cognitive processes (Mayer,
Caruso, & Salovey, 1999) was changed to facilitating, defined as the ability to generate, use,
and feel emotion as necessary to communicate feelings or employ them in other cognitive
processes (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002). This new 141-item scale was renamed the
Mayer, Salovey, Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test or MSCEIT (Mayer et al., 2002).
Forms. While the literature on emotional intelligence increased in popularity as a
result of the work of Mayer and colleagues, researchers suggested that the focus on functions,
was limited in scope, as it was missing a theoretical understanding of how emotional
intelligence is enacted by an individual in each situation (i.e., form). This focus on how
emotional intelligence is measured grew out of the application of Appraisal theory
(Roseman, 2001). Within the cognitive conceptualization of emotion, appraisal theory is
widely accepted and states “emotions are elicited by evaluations, or appraisals, of events and
situations” (Roseman, 2001, p. 3), or more simply, our emotions occur as a result of our
appraisals of our environment. This research began when psychologists became more
interested in emotions and pondered why some people would react differently to the same
situation. Early researchers, such as Arnold (1950), put forth the idea that we intuitively seek
out positive appraisals of situations, avoid negative and ignore indifferent. Lazarus expanded
upon this idea by suggesting that individuals differ in the ways they think about emotions
based on the type of emotion (e.g. sadness, fear, anger, etc.) and the situation in which the
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emotion occurs (e.g. harmful, beneficial, or benign; Lazarus, Averill, & Opton, 1970). For
example, imagine a situation in which an employee is called into their manager’s office. If
the employee interprets the tone of voice as stern, the employee’s heart rate increases and
experiences fear. However, if the employee interprets the tone of voice as congratulatory, the
employee’s heart rate increases but experiences joy (Lazarus & Lazarus, 1991).
Researchers examining the ways in which emotional intelligence is enacted within
specific situations initially have suggested four dimensions, (1) appraisal and expression of
emotion in oneself, (2) appraisal and expression of emotion in others, (3) regulation of
emotion in oneself, and (4) use of emotion to facilitate performance (Davies, Stankov, &
Robets, 1998). Subsequently however, researchers (Joseph & Newman, 2010; Tett, Fox, &
Wang, 2005) have suggested collapsing these constructs down to the two dimensions of
emotion recognition and emotion regulation. Given the importance of these forms in
understanding emotional intelligence, next I will discuss these concepts in more detail.
Emotion Recognition. As a form of emotional intelligence, emotion recognition is
one of the ways in which an individual portrays their emotional development. Emotion
recognition is defined as the ability to perceive and identify emotions (Ekman et al., 1969),
and can be applied to recognition of your own emotions, as well as recognition of the
emotions of others. The ability to recognize emotions begins at a very young age (Campos,
Campos, & Barrett, 1989; Saarni, 2000; Walker-Andrews, 1997) and develops over the
lifetime (Ciarrochi, Heaven, & Supavadeeprasit, 2008; Durand, Gallay, Seigneuric,
Robichon, & Baudouin, 2007). When children are learning how to recognize emotions, they
are using the cues from their caretakers such facial expressions by examining the changes in
eyebrows, mouth, etc. (Busso et al., 2004; Walker-Andrews, 1997).
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Emotion recognition varies by the type of emotion is being expressed. For example,
one study examined 100 children ages five to twelve and 26 adults (mean age 22), using an
emotion recognition task of identifying emotions from faces. The children as young as five
years old could accurately recognize happiness and sadness from the pictures near the same
accuracy level of the adults in the study (Durand, Gallay, Seigneuric, Robichon & Baudouin,
2007). However, the five-year-olds were less accurate at identifying other emotions like fear,
anger, and disgust. The group of 10- and 11-year-olds had near adult accuracy for fear, anger,
and neutrality (Durand et al., 2007). Further discussion points to their inaccuracy because of
a lack of knowledge about these emotions’ effects on facial expressions, and not from
ignorance of these emotion words (Durand et al., 2007).
One study followed 90 four-year-old’s through their pre-school year to examine
emotion recognition of their classmates. Researchers took pictures of the preschoolers
exhibiting five expressions: happy, sad, angry, surprise, and afraid, and had their classmates
identify the emotions from the facial expressions (Barth & Bastiani, 1997). Researchers
found that although children were told their expression choices for each picture, most
children did not use the words surprised or afraid to describe their classmates’ facial
expressions. However, researchers are unsure if the low accuracy of emotion recognition is
due to the nature of the stimuli or due to children's inability to recognize these expressions.
Because of this measurement error, researchers calculated three (happy, sad, and anger)
recognition bias scores based on how often they used that emotion divided by their total
number of answers (Barth & Bastiani, 1997). Results indicate that recognition biases may be
more predictive of social behavior when compared to recognition accuracy, especially when
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children used anger to identify a higher proportion of facial expressions suggesting that they
have hostile perceptions and view anger more often in the faces of their classmates (Barth &
Bastiani, 1997).
One of the difficulties in measuring emotion recognition is its external validity with
real-life emotional situations. As adults, we still use facial expressions to recognize emotions
in others, but we also use many other contextual factors like the tone of voice and the
surrounding situational cues. In the emotion field, recognition is typically measured by how
well an individual can identify an emotion from a picture of a facial expression (Elfenbein,
Marsh, & Ambady, 2002; Guarnera, Hichy, Cascio, & Carrubba, 2015; Mayer, DiPaolo, &
Salovey, 1990; Matsumoto et al., 2000). The newer measures focus on the context and
appraisals instead of the early developmental facial expression recognition tasks (MacCann
& Roberts, 2008).
Emotion Recognition and Distress. On the other hand, the inability to accurately
name and recognize emotions has clinical implications in others is sometimes referred to as
alexithymia (Ciarrochi, Heaven & Supavadeeprasit, 2008) and is a key symptom in Autism
Spectrum Disorder (Bal, Harden, Lamb, Van Hecke, Denver, & Porges, 2010).
However, in non-non-clinical samples, decreased emotion recognition also has been
associated with increased anxiety (Hattingh, Ipser, Tromp, Syal, Lochner, Brooks & Stein,
2013), lower social competence (e.g., Mirabile, 2010), perceived lack of social support (e.g.,
Ciarrochi, Heaven & Supavadeeprasit, 2008), and relationship dissatisfaction (e.g., Croyle &
Waltz, 2002; Smith, Heaven, & Ciarrochi, 2008). In one study, 56 heterosexual couples were
asked “how would the other person feel?” (Croyle & Waltz, 2002, p. 437) and results
indicated that discrepancies in scores between partners on emotional awareness (i.e., emotion
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recognition) were associated with decreased relationship satisfaction. Emotion recognition in
adolescents is particularly important due to the increased awareness of emotions in social
interactions amongst peers (Ciarrochi, Heaven, & Supavadeeprasit, 2008). When comparing
adolescents (n = 667) on their ability to recognize emotions, participants who were better at
emotion identification (e.g., “It is difficult for me to find the right words for my feelings”;
Ciarrochi, Heaven, & Supavadeeprasit, 2008, p. 7) were more likely to have reported
increased social support.
In a recent meta-analysis, the relationship between emotion recognition and anxiety
were examined from brain images (obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging
[fMRI]) from 91 individuals with social anxiety disorder, and 93 individuals without.
Researchers found that “limbic regions were consistently more active in those with social
anxiety disorder, in response to emotional stimuli, than compared to those without (Bal,
Harden, Lamb, Van Hecke, Denver, & Porges, 2010). This further confirms the path between
emotion recognition and psychological distress variables like anxiety. Within emotional
intelligence, there is another commonly researched aspect called emotion regulation. These
two constructs are often related, but add distinct aspects to the literature, and these two
aspects may provide parallel mediators in the link between emotion socialization and
psychological distress.
Emotion Regulation. Additionally, as a form of emotional intelligence, as how we
regulate our emotions. Emotion regulation research has included the awareness and
understanding of one's emotions, acceptance of emotions, and the ability to successfully use
appropriate strategies to regulate one's emotions in a given situation (e.g., Brackett et al.,
2013; Eisenberg, 2000; Larsen, 2000; Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, & Sitarenios, 2003;
