Sense and sensibility: The role of cognitive and emotional intelligence in negotiation

Impact of facemasks on psychotherapy: Clinician's confidence and emotion recognition

OBJECTIVES

Facial emotion recognition is a key component of human interactions, and in clinical relationships contributes to building and maintaining the therapeutic alliance with patients. The introduction of facemasks has reduced the availability of facial information in private and professional relationships. This study aimed to assess the impact of facemasks on clinicians' perception of clinical interactions as well as their ability to read facial expressions.

METHODS

In this cross-sectional study, a purposive sample of 342 clinical psychologists or psychotherapists completed an online survey including the assessment of burnout, alexithymia, emotion dysregulation, and self-perceived ability to build effective relationships and communication with patients with/without facemasks. Participants were randomly assigned to the standardized facial emotion recognition task Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy FACES 2-Adult Faces including 24 faces representing anger, fear, sadness, and happiness.

RESULTS

Facemasks impaired the self-perceived ability of clinicians to build effective relationships and communicate with patients and reduced satisfaction in clinical encounters. The ability of clinicians to recognize facial emotions is significantly reduced for masked happy and angry faces, but not for sad and afraid ones. The perceived difficulty in building good relationships and communication with patients had a positive correlation with alexithymia and emotion dysregulation; higher levels of discomfort when wearing facemasks had a positive correlation with burnout and emotion dysregulation.

CONCLUSION

Facemasks reduced clinicians' self-confidence in clinical encounters with patients wearing facemasks, but their facial emotion recognition performance was only partially impaired.

The Role of Regulatory Focus and Emotion Recognition Bias in Cross-Cultural Negotiation

Prior research on cross-cultural negotiation has emphasized the cognitive and the behavioral elements. This study takes a different perspective and presents a motivation–emotion model of cross-cultural negotiation. We propose that the cultural differences in chronic regulatory focus will lead to cultural biases in emotion recognition, which in turn will affect negotiation behaviors. People are inclined to perceive and behave in ways that enhance regulatory fit. Westerners and East Asians, who each have different chronic regulatory focus, are likely to interpret the negotiation situation differently in order to increase their regulatory fit. Specifically, this study proposes that when the emotion of the opponent is ambiguous, people from different cultural backgrounds may show cultural biases in emotion recognition, concentrating on the emotion that fits their chronic regulatory focus. Drawing on the Emotion as Social Information (EASI) model, this study discusses how these cultural biases in emotion recognition can affect people’s negotiation behaviors. Finally, some possible moderators of the motivation–emotion model including power and emotion recognition accuracy are suggested to promote sustainable practices in cross-cultural negotiation.

Distributive/integrative negotiation strategies in cross-cultural contexts: a comparative study of the USA and Italy

Integrative and distributive negotiation strategies are a key paradigm of practice, teaching, and research. Are these US-formulated negotiation prototypes valid in the rest of the world? Adopting a cross-cultural view, we analyze a sample of 214 foreigners who detailed the negotiation behavior they faced in Italy (134) and in the United States (80). Implementing latent class analysis, we identify three clusters of negotiation prototypes. Our findings show how the Country is a predictor for cluster membership, and peculiar cultural traits of the two groups contribute to explain the differences in negotiation strategies. Three prototypes emerged: a typically distributive, an emotional integrative (mostly Italian), and an impersonal integrative (mostly American). Results show how the handling of emotions is a crucial part of the interaction for Italian negotiators, regardless of their orientation toward negotiation strategies, implying a cultural influence toward handling emotions in negotiations.

Emotion Recognition Ability as a Predictor of Well-Being During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study examined emotion recognition ability (ERA) as a predictor of positive and negative affect in two Australian and one German-speaking samples (total N = 469) during the first 2 weeks of major public life restrictions in the COVID-19 pandemic in March/April 2020. Individuals with higher ERA did not report more positive affect, but they felt less burdened and reported less negative affect. This association was fully mediated by lower COVID-19-related media consumption and less negative affect after reading an eyewitness report from an Italian city with a high COVID-19 death toll. However, higher ERA was also related to arguing more with close others. For low-to-medium ERA, an adaptive cognitive emotion regulation style predicted lower media consumption and for medium-to-high ERA, a maladaptive regulation style marginally increased the perceived likelihood of experiencing a similar situation as in Italy, suggesting that regulation style may moderate the ERA–affect relationship.

Accuracy in Judging Others' Personalities: The Role of Emotion Recognition, Emotion Understanding, and Trait Emotional Intelligence

The ability to accurately judge others’ personality and the ability to accurately recognize others’ emotions are both part of the broader construct of interpersonal accuracy (IPA). However, little research has examined the association between these two IPA domains. Little is also known about the relationship between personality judgment accuracy and other socio-emotional skills and traits. In the present study, 121 participants judged eight traits (Big Five, intelligence, cooperativeness, and empathy) in each of 30 targets who were presented either in a photograph, a muted video, or a video with sound. The videos were 30 second excerpts from negotiations that the targets had engaged in. Participants also completed standard tests of emotion recognition ability, emotion understanding, and trait emotional intelligence. Results showed that personality judgment accuracy, when indexed as trait accuracy and distinctive profile accuracy, positively correlated with emotion recognition ability and was unrelated to emotion understanding and trait emotional intelligence. Female participants were more accurate in judging targets’ personality than men. These results provide support for IPA as a set of correlated domain-specific skills and encourage further research on personality judgment accuracy as a meaningful individual difference variable.

Variables Associated With Negotiation Effectiveness: The Role of Mindfulness

Negotiation is the main mean of conflict resolution. Despite its capital importance, little is known about influencing variables or effective interventions. Mindfulness has shown to improve subjects’ performance in different settings but until now, no study has shown its impact in negotiation. The aim of this study is to analyze which variables are associated with effectiveness and to determine if meditators are more effective in negotiation. A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out. The study variables were: socio-demographic variables, negotiation effectiveness (Negotiation Effectiveness Questionnaire), mindfulness (Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire), emotional intelligence (Trait Meta-Mood Scale Questionnaire), personality (NEO-FFI personality inventory), motivation (McClelland Questionnaire), and negotiation style (Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II). A correlational study and a multivariate model were developed. Negotiation effectiveness was associated with age, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, achievement motivation, integrating, dominating, and compromising negotiation styles and inversely correlated toward neuroticism. The effectiveness of the negotiation is explained by the variables clarity, age, conscientiousness, dominating, and compromising style. Meditators were found to be more effective than non-meditators.

A meta-analysis of the relationship between emotion recognition ability and intelligence

The ability to recognise others' emotions from nonverbal cues (emotion recognition ability, ERA) is measured with performance-based tests and has many positive correlates. Although researchers have long proposed that ERA is related to general mental ability or intelligence, a comprehensive analysis of this relationship is lacking. For instance, it remains unknown whether the magnitude of the association varies by intelligence type, ERA test features, as well as demographic variables. The present meta-analysis examined the relationship between ERA and intelligence based on 471 effect sizes from 133 samples and found a significant mean effect size (controlled for nesting within samples) of r = .19. Different intelligence types (crystallized, fluid, spatial, memory, information processing speed and efficiency) yielded similar effect sizes, whereas academic achievement measures (e.g. SAT scores) were unrelated to ERA. Effect sizes were higher for ERA tests that simultaneously present facial, vocal, and bodily cues (as compared to tests using static pictures) and for tests with higher reliability and more emotions. Results were unaffected by most study and sample characteristics, but effect size increased with higher mean age of the sample. These findings establish ERA as sensory-cognitive ability that is distinct from, yet related to, intelligence.