"I Understand You, So I'll Not Hurt You with My Irony": Correlations between irony and emotional intelligence

Abstract

Due to the growing interest not only in theoretical approaches to irony, but also in its pragmatic functions, the number of questions is increasing. One of them is: Is irony in any way connected to emotional intelligence? This paper outlines what irony is and how it is used in everyday conversations. Analysis of current studies in emotional intelligence highlights its influence over behavior and attitude. It led to an experiment where subjects (N = 80) where asked to fill an emotional intelligence questionnaire and an irony questionnaire. The results show that emotional intelligence is negatively correlated with the overall sum of ironic sentences and self-ironic sentences, and with the number of ironic praise sentences. Later, the implications of empirical findings are discussed.