This July, Dr. James Floman, Associate Research Scientist in the Child Study Center, presented new research from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence for the International Society for Research on Emotions in Belfast, Ireland.
His presentation, "Emotion Understanding, Emotion Regulation, and Mental Well-Being: Evidence from New Emotion Ability Tests," introduced evidence across five validity studies for three novel tests developed by Dr. Floman and team (Drs. Marc Brackett, Sigal Barsade, Matthew LaPalme, Annette Ponnock, and Aidan Doyle).
The newly developed assessments have addressed critical gaps in Emotion Understanding tests, each targeting unique aspects of emotion knowledge, understanding, and ability. The Emotion Language Test (ELT) assesses the depth and precision of emotional vocabulary across 10 primary emotions. This test offers insights from 20,000 emotion terms, a collection defined by expert consensus and machine learning. The Conceptual Emotion Granularity Test (CEGT) examines how individuals organize emotions into mental categories, from broad classifications of emotions to nuanced, specific distinctions. The Core Relational Themes of Emotion (CORE) Test assesses knowledge of the underlying meanings and themes associated with 19 positive and negative emotions, such as achievement for pride and loss for sadness.
Through five validity studies involving over 2,000 demographically diverse working adults in the U.S., Dr. Floman and team established the reliability and effectiveness of these new assessments. Their findings demonstrated that individuals with higher emotion understanding abilities exhibit greater emotion regulation skills and experience enhanced mental well-being. In this case, enhanced mental well-being includes greater purpose in life, lower negative affect and compassion fatigue, and a belief that emotions can be changed and are not uncontrollable.
Notably, the new tests showed significant predictive power beyond widely used measures of emotion understanding ability, underscoring their potential to advance theoretical and empirical scholarship on emotion understanding and its many applications to promote mental well-being.
For more information on this research and its implications, please contact Dr. Floman and stay tuned for updates from the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence on this line of study.