From Mindfulness to Emotional Intelligence: Analyzing the Effects of Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Emotion Perception and Emotion Regulation in a Clinical Population

Emotional intelligence (EI) can be split into four facets: emotion perception, use, understanding, and regulation. Greater overall levels of emotional intelligence (EI) are associated with a number of positive outcomes, while lower levels of EI are associated with negative outcomes. A popular theory, labeled "the dark side of EI," posits that it is not overall levels of EI that result in positive or negative outcomes, instead EI related outcomes are due to a balance between individual facets such that an imbalance results in negative outcomes and a balance results in positive outcomes. It is thought that this is majorly implicated in addiction, as addicted individuals display major deficits in the emotion regulation facet and less major deficits in emotion perception, resulting in an imbalance between the facets. Moreover, mindfulness based interventions (MBIs) are shown to be effective in treating addiction, but whether this is due to their effects on EI remains unclear. This thesis conducted a literature review on mindfulness, EI, and addiction and conducted meta-analyses examining the impact of MBIs on the EI facets of emotion perception and regulation in addicted populations. This thesis also updated a previous meta-analysis by Lavine (2021) to analyze the effects of MBIs on emotion perception and regulation in a healthy population, although there was not enough time to complete emotion perception in healthy population meta-analysis. For the completed meta-analyses, post-hoc analyses were also done to examine the acute and longitudinal effects of MBIs immediately following MBI completion and long after MBI completion. In the addiction meta-analyses, 4 studies met inclusion criteria for emotion perception and 7 studies met the inclusion criteria for emotion regulation. In the healthy meta-analysis, 9 studies met inclusion criteria for emotion regulation. The results show that MBIs acutely increase both emotion perception and regulation in addicted populations such that they are likely balanced, which could be a major contributing factor to the success of MBI as a treatment for addiction. However, the effects seem to be transient, as the positive effects decrease longitudinally for both emotion perception and emotion regulation, with the most drastic decrease being seen in emotion regulation. This results in an even greater imbalance over time that could ultimately exacerbate the negative effects of addiction. A similar transient effect was found for the emotion regulation analysis in healthy populations. The results of this thesis are preliminary, as further research is required to come to any staunch conclusions surrounding the effects of MBIs on emotional intelligence in both healthy and addicted populations.