The Emotional Intelligence, Health, and Well-Being Nexus: What Have We Learned and What Have We Missed?

This paper reviews the claimed pivotal role of emotional intelligence (EI) in well‐being and health. Specifically, we examine the utility of EI in predicting health and well‐being and point to future research issues that the field might profitably explore. EI is predictive of various indicators of well‐being, as well as both physical and psychological health, but existing research has methodological limitations including over‐reliance on self‐report measures, and neglect of overlap between EI and personality measures. Interventions focusing on emotional perception, understanding and expression, and emotion regulation, seem potentially important for improving health and well‐being, but research on EI has not yet made a major contribution to therapeutic practice. Future research, using a finer‐grained approach to measurement of both predictors and criteria might most usefully focus on intra‐ and inter‐personal processes that may mediate effects of EI on health. A video of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_8JZX1Uc4k.