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EMOTIONAL AND DECISIONAL COMPETENCE IN ADOLESCENCE: RATIONALITY AND DECISION-MAKING STYLE

A. Moraru

Abstract

Emotional competence - the ability to understand, express and regulate one’s own and other’s emotions - has an important consequence on personal and academic life of students, contributing to their wellbeing, mental health, resilience to stress, academic and social success. Emotions influence both minor and important decisions in real life: they can be crystallized as cognitive style in decision making, (e.g. avoidant, vigilant, preoccupied or intuitive). Most studies were focused on self-report emotional intelligence (as a trait) and decision-making style, being in this way closer to estimate personality factors than true abilities or competencies. The present study investigates emotional competence as a self-perceived ability, through two different measures – ESCQ-45 (Taksic, 2009) and SECQ (King 2008) to have also a convergent validity index for the construct; for decision-making process, a reliable Romanian performance test is proposed: Decisional Capacity Test (Miclea and colab., 2009) and a standard decision-making style test like Decision Style Questionnaire (Leykin, DeRubeis, 2010). Result on 106 high-school Romanian students show gender and high-school profile/speciality bias in emotional competence and decision-making style. Also, emotional competence proved to be a good predictor for different decision styles, but not for decision ability. Emotional competent students are not different from their colleagues in rationality of their decisions, they are equally subject to cognitive bias during this complex process of decision-making.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2017/32/S11.016

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