Experiential and strategic emotional intelligence are implicated when inhibiting affective and non-affective distractors: Findings from three emotional flanker n-back tasks

Abstract

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to a set of competencies to process, understand, and rea-son with affective information. Recent studies suggest ability measures of experiential and strategic EI differentially predict performance on non-emotional and emotionally laden tasks. To explore cognitive processes underlying these abilities further, we varied the affective context of a traditional letter-based n-back working-memory task. In study 1, participants completed 0-, 2-, and 3-back tasks with flanking distractors that were either emotional (fearful or happy faces) or non-emotional (shapes or letters stimuli). Strategic EI, but not experiential EI, significantly influenced participants’ accuracy across all n-back levels, irrespective of flanker type. In Study 2, participants completed 1-, 2-, and 3-back levels. Experiential EI was positively associated with response times for emotional flankers at the 1-back level but not other levels or flanker types, suggesting those higher in experiential EI reacted slower on low-load trials with affective context. In Study 3, flankers were asyn-chronously presented either 300 ms or 1000 ms before probes. Results mirrored Study 1 for accuracy rates and Study 2 for response times. Our findings (a) provide experimental evidence for the dis-tinctness of experiential and strategic EI and (b) suggest that each are related to different aspects of cognitive processes underlying working memory.