Improvements in mindfulness, interoceptive and emotional awareness, emotion regulation, and interpersonal emotion management following completion of an online emotional skills training program.

Socioemotional skills, such as the ability to recognize, understand, and regulate the emotions of self and others, are associated with both physical and emotional health. The present study tested the effectiveness of a recently validated online training program for increasing these emotional skills in adults. In this study, 448 participants (323 female) were randomly assigned to complete this training program or a placebo control program. Among those who completed the training program or placebo (N = 326), the training program led to improved scores post-training on measures of interoceptive and emotional awareness, mindfulness, emotion recognition, and emotion regulation strategies (e.g., reduced emotion suppression and greater impulse control) relative to placebo. In a smaller group of participants who also completed a 6-month follow-up visit (N = 94), sustained improvements were observed on several measures in those who completed the training program, while the placebo group instead showed decreased performance. This suggested a potentially protective effect against emotional challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic occurring during this time. These results suggest that this online training program shows promise in improving emotional skills relevant to adaptive social and emotional functioning, and that it might be useful as an intervention within at-risk populations and those with emotional disorders associated with reduced application of these skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Development and validation of an online emotional intelligence training program.

Introduction: Emotional intelligence (EI) is associated with a range of positive health, wellbeing, and behavioral outcomes. The present article describes the development and validation of an online training program for increasing EI abilities in adults. The training program was based on theoretical models of emotional functioning and empirical literature on successful approaches for training socioemotional skills and resilience. Methods: After an initial design, programming, and refinement process, the completed online program was tested for efficacy in a sample of 326 participants (72% female) from the general population. Participants were randomly assigned to complete either the EI training program (n = 168) or a matched placebo control training program (n = 158). Each program involved 10-12 hours of engaging online content and was completed during either a 1-week (n = 175) or 3-week (n = 151) period. Results: Participants who completed the EI training program showed increased scores from pre- to post-training on standard self-report (i.e., trait) measures of EI (relative to placebo), indicating self-perceived improvements in recognizing emotions, understanding emotions, and managing the emotions of others. Moreover, those in the EI training also showed increased scores in standard performance-based (i.e., ability) EI measures, demonstrating an increased ability to strategically use and manage emotions relative to placebo. Improvements to performance measures also remained significantly higher than baseline when measured six months after completing the training. The training was also well-received and described as helpful and engaging. Discussion: Following a rigorous iterative development process, we created a comprehensive and empirically based online training program that is well-received and engaging. The program reliably improves both trait and ability EI outcomes and gains are sustained up to six months post-training. This program could provide an easy and scalable method for building emotional intelligence in a variety of settings.

Chronic sleep restriction affects the association between implicit bias and explicit social decision making.

OBJECTIVES: Previous work suggests that sleep restriction (SR) reduces cognitive control and may increase negative implicit biases. Here we investigated whether SR might influence decision making on a social-evaluative task where individuals had to make judgments of threat based on facial photographs. Furthermore, we investigated the effect of changes in negative implicit biases as a result of sleep restriction on this decision-making task. DESIGN: Fourteen healthy adults underwent two 3-week counterbalanced in-laboratory stays (chronic SR and control sleep [CS] conditions). Participants completed the Arab Muslim Names implicit association test (a measure of implicit bias/attitudes toward Arab Muslims) and the Karolinska Airport Task (a measure of explicit decision making). The Karolinska Airport Task requires participants to judge the potential dangerousness of individuals based on facial photographs. RESULTS: After SR, participants were more likely to deem individuals with less positive and more negative facial features as dangerous than after CS. In addition, after SR, those participants showing higher negative implicit bias toward Arab Muslims tended to consider as more dangerous individuals with more quintessentially untrustworthy facial features (r = 0.76, P = .007), whereas this relationship was nonsignificant after CS (r = 0.33, P = .28). CONCLUSIONS: These findings show not only that SR may increase implicit biases against a particular minority group but that SR also modifies how individuals make explicit decisions about another's trustworthiness based on facial features. These findings may have important implications for many occupations where workers who are routinely restricted of sleep are also responsible for making judgments about other people's trustworthiness (eg, police, security, military personnel).