Individual differences in emotional intelligence and incidental memory of words

Participants were required to complete the Japanese version of the Emotional Skills and Competence Questionnaire (Toyota, Morita, & Taksic, 2007) to assess their level of emotional intelligence. Then they were asked to rate the pleasantness of an episode that each target reminded them of, followed by unexpected free recall tests. Participants with high emotional intelligence recalled targets with pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant episodes equally. However, for participants with low emotional intelligence, targets with neutral episodes were recalled less than those with pleasant or unpleasant ones. These results were interpreted as showing that the level of emotional intelligence determined the effectiveness of neutral episodes on targets as retrieval cues.