Speed of Emotional Information Processing as Correlate of Emotional Intelligence

The research shows an attempt to explore the relationships of emotional intelligence and speed of emotional information processing. Following foreign researchers, who draw parallel between psychometric and emotional intelligence in relationship to speed of information processing, we assume that the basis of individual differences in emotional intelligence lies in speed of emotional information processing. 104 subjects took part in the research. For the measurement of emotional processing we used emotional Stroop task, task on emotional visual search and dot probe task. Emotional intelligence was measured with one self-report (questionnaire EmIn) and one test (videotest) method. Statistically significant correlations of emotional intelligence were found for emotional Stroop task (negative correlations with the scales "Management of emotions of others" and "Interpersonal emotional intelligence" and positive correlations with the scale "Sensitivity to orientation emotions"), as well as for the two measures of emotional visual search task (negative correlations of difference in response time in finding angry faces between joyful ones and anger against the background of neutral expression with the measures of videotest "Sensitivity to positive emotions with low activation"). By virtue of attained results, the automatic speed-up / slowdown of processing in threat detection, as well as relative velocity of identification and effectiveness of face recognition that express joy and anger may be viewed as the cognitive correlates of emotional intelligence. The lack of statistically significant relationships between emotional intelligence and other measurements is interpreted as the consequence of excessively difficult assumptions that lay in the basis of the used tasks, which hinder the revelation of the relationships in interest.