Follow your gut? Emotional intelligence moderates the association between physiologically measured somatic markers and risk-taking

Impact of emotional competence on physicians' clinical reasoning: a scoping review protocol

INTRODUCTION

Clinical reasoning (CR) is a key competence for physicians and a major source of damaging medical errors. Many strategies have been explored to improve CR quality, most of them based on knowledge enhancement, cognitive debiasing and the use of analytical reasoning. If increasing knowledge and fostering analytical reasoning have shown some positive results, the impact of debiasing is however mixed. Debiasing and promoting analytical reasoning have also been criticised for their lack of pragmatism. Alternative means of increasing CR quality are therefore still needed. Because emotions are known to influence the quality of reasoning in general, we hypothesised that emotional competence (EC) could improve physicians' CR. EC refers to the ability to identify, understand, express, regulate and use emotions. The influence of EC on CR remains unclear. This article presents a scoping review protocol, the aim of which will be to describe the current state of knowledge concerning the influence of EC on physicians' CR, the type of available literature and finally the different methods used to examine the link between EC and CR.

METHOD AND ANALYSIS

The population of interest is physicians and medical students. EC will be explored according to the model of Mikolajczak et al, describing five major components of EC (identify, understand, express, regulate and use emotions). The concept of CR will include terms related to its processes and outcomes. Context will include real or simulated clinical situations. The search for primary sources and reviews will be conducted in MEDLINE (via Ovid), Scopus and PsycINFO. The grey literature will be searched in the references of included articles and in OpenGrey. Study selection and data extraction will be conducted using the Covidence software. Search and inclusion results will be reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses extension for scoping review model (PRISMA-ScR).

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION

There are no ethical or safety concerns regarding this review.

REGISTRATION DETAILS

OSF Registration DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GM7YD.

Interoceptive accuracy is associated with benefits in decision making in children

Introduction

Decision making results not only from logical analyses, but seems to be further guided by the ability to perceive somatic information (interoceptive accuracy). Relations between interoceptive accuracy and decision making have been exclusively studied in adults and with regard to complex, uncertain situations (as measured by the Iowa Gambling Task, IGT).

Methods

In the present study, 1454 children (6-11 years) were examined at two time points (approximately 1 year apart) using an IGT as well as a delay-of-gratification task for sweets-items and toy-items. Interoceptive accuracy was measured using a child-adapted version of the Heartbeat Perception Task.

Results

The present results revealed that children with higher, as compared to lower, interoceptive accuracy showed more advantageous choices in the IGT and delayed more sweets-items, but not toy-items, in a delay-of-gratification task at time point 2 but not at time point 1. However, no longitudinal relation between interoceptive accuracy and decision making 1 year later could be shown.

Discussion

Results indicate that interoceptive accuracy relates to decision-making abilities in situations of varying complexity already in middle childhood, and that this link might consolidate across the examined 1-year period. Furthermore, the association of interoceptive accuracy and the delay of sweets-items might have implications for the regulation of body weight at a later age.

QEPro: An ability measure of emotional intelligence for managers in a French cultural environment

Managers' interest in the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has grown steadily due to an accumulation of published articles and books touting EI's benefits. For over thirty years, many researchers have used or designed tools for measuring EI, most of which raise important psychometric, cultural and contextual issues. The aim of this article is to address some of the main limitations observed in previous studies of EI. By developing and validating QEPro we propose a new performance-based measure of EI based on a modified version of Mayer and Salovey's (1997) four-branch model. QEPro is an ability EI measure specifically dedicated to managers and business executives in a French cultural environment (N = 1035 managers and executives). In order to increase both the ecological and the face validity of the test for the target population we used the Situational Judgment Tests framework and a theory-based item development and scoring approach. For all items, correct and incorrect response options were developed using established theories from the emotion and management fields. Our study showed that QEPro has good psychometric qualities such as high measurement precision and internal consistency, an appropriate level of difficulty and a clear factorial structure. The tool also correlates in meaningful and theoretically congruent ways with general intelligence, Trait EI measures, the Big Five factors of personality, and the Affect measures used in this study. For all these reasons, QEPro is a promising tool for studying the role of EI competencies in managerial outcomes.

An Immersive Virtual Reality Game for Predicting Risk Taking through the Use of Implicit Measures

Risk taking (RT) measurement constitutes a challenge for researchers and practitioners and has been addressed from different perspectives. Personality traits and temperamental aspects such as sensation seeking and impulsivity influence the individual’s approach to RT, prompting risk-seeking or risk-aversion behaviors. Virtual reality has emerged as a suitable tool for RT measurement, since it enables the exposure of a person to realistic risks, allowing embodied interactions, the application of stealth assessment techniques and physiological real-time measurement. In this article, we present the assessment on decision making in risk environments (AEMIN) tool, as an enhanced version of the spheres and shield maze task, a previous tool developed by the authors. The main aim of this article is to study whether it is possible is to discriminate participants with high versus low scores in the measures of personality, sensation seeking and impulsivity, through their behaviors and physiological responses during playing AEMIN. Applying machine learning methods to the dataset we explored: (a) if through these data it is possible to discriminate between the two populations in each variable; and (b) which parameters better discriminate between the two populations in each variable. The results support the use of AEMIN as an ecological assessment tool to measure RT, since it brings to light behaviors that allow to classify the subjects into high/low risk-related psychological constructs. Regarding physiological measures, galvanic skin response seems to be less salient in prediction models.

The Role of Emotional vs. Cognitive Intelligence in Economic Decision-Making Amongst Older Adults

The links between emotions, bio-regulatory processes, and economic decision-making are well-established in the context of age-related changes in fluid, real-time, decision competency. The objective of the research reported here is to assess the relative contributions, interactions, and impacts of affective and cognitive intelligence in economic, value-based decision-making amongst older adults. Additionally, we explored this decision-making competency in the context of the neurobiology of aging by examining the neuroanatomical correlates of intelligence and decision-making in an aging cohort. Thirty-nine, healthy, community dwelling older adults were administered the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), an ecologically valid laboratory measure of complex, economic decision-making; along with standardized, performance-based measures of cognitive and emotional intelligence (EI). A smaller subset of this group underwent structural brain scans from which thicknesses of the frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, cingulate cortices and their sub-sections, were computed. Fluid (online processing) aspects of Perceptual Reasoning cognitive intelligence predicted superior choices on the IGT. However, older adults with higher overall emotional intelligence (EI) and higher Experiential EI area/sub-scores learned faster to make better choices on the IGT, even after controlling for cognitive intelligence and its area scores. Thickness of the left rostral anterior cingulate (associated with fluid affective, processing) mediated the relationship between age and Experiential EI. Thickness of the right transverse temporal gyrus moderated the rate of learning on the IGT. In conclusion, our data suggest that fluid processing, which involves "online," bottom-up, cognitive processing, predicts value-based decision-making amongst older adults, while crystallized intelligence, which relies on "offline" previously acquired knowledge, does not. However, only emotional intelligence, especially its fluid "online" aspects of affective processing predicts the rate of learning in situations of complex choice, especially when there is a paucity of cues/information available to guide decision-making. Age-related effects on these cognitive, affective and decision mechanisms may have neuroanatomical correlates, especially in regions that form a subset of the human mirror-neuron and mentalizing systems. While superior decision-making may be stereotypically associated with "smarter people" (i.e., higher cognitive intelligence), our data indicate that emotional intelligence has a significant role to play in the economic decisions of older adults.

An indirect debiasing method: Priming a target attribute reduces judgmental biases in likelihood estimations

Understanding the underlying psychological process that leads to a bias is crucial for developing remedies to correct or reduce the bias. As one of the psychological processes that underlie judgmental biases, attribute substitution provides an explanation as to why people rely on heuristics and commit judgmental biases. Attribute substitution occurs when people make a judgment that requires the use of a target attribute, but make the judgment using a heuristic attribute that comes more readily to mind. This substitution inevitably introduces systematic errors because these two attributes are different. The current work explores an indirect debiasing method-the priming of a target attribute. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that priming a target attribute in prior tasks reduces judgmental biases in likelihood estimations: ratio-bias and base-rate neglect. However, this outcome only occurs when participants have enough cognitive resources. When they experience cognitive load, the priming of the target attribute does not reduce their judgmental biases.