Emotional intelligence and emotion regulation strategies

Do emotional abilities relate to specifi c strategies of emotion regulation? Do people with higher emotional intelligence (EI) use more effi cient affect regulation strategies? In the current study we tried to answer these questions. Using a sample of 349 undergraduate students, the present study explored the relationships between emotional intelligence (assessed with performance measure) and the habitual use of suppression and reappraisal. Results showed that higher emotional intelligence was related to more frequent use of reappraisal, and less frequent employment of suppression. As in the previous studies, males and females signifi cantly differed in suppression: men suppressed more than women. However, our results revealed that this difference could be attributed only to men with low EI. Emotionally unintelligent men used suppression more frequently not only in comparison to women, but also to men with higher EI. With respect to the habitual use of reappraisal, only men disclosed a signifi cant relation to EI level: those male participants who revealed the highest EI level declared employment of reappraisal more frequently than other groups.