Sex differences in emotional and meta-emotional intelligence in pre-adolescents and adolescents. Antonella D'Amico, Alessandro Geraci. Acta Psychologica, Volume 227, July 2022, 103594. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103594
Highlights
• Girls show higher levels of ability EI than boys.
• Boys report higher levels of self-reported EI than girls.
• Boys tend to overestimate their emotional abilities compared to girls.
• Girls tend to underestimate their emotional abilities compared to boys.
• Girls report higher scores than boys in meta-emotional beliefs.
Abstract: The study focuses on sex differences in emotional and meta-emotional intelligence in a sample of 355 pre-adolescents and 164 adolescents. Emotional and meta-emotional intelligence were measured using the multi-trait multi-method IE-ACCME test, allowing to define individuals' profiles of ability EI, emotional self-concept, meta-emotional knowledge, meta-emotional ability in self-evaluation and meta-emotional beliefs. Meta-emotional dimensions refer to the awareness of individuals about their emotional abilities and to their beliefs about the functioning of emotions in everyday life. Results demonstrated that girls scored better than boys in ability-EI, in particular in adolescents' group, whereas boys reported higher score than girls in emotional self-concept in both groups of age. Result about meta-emotional knowledge and meta-emotional ability in self-evaluation revealed that boys systematically overestimate their emotional abilities whereas girls, particularly in the adolescent group, tend to underestimate them. Finally, in both age groups, girls scored higher than males in metaemotional beliefs. The adoption of the meta-emotional intelligence framework may help to explain the discordances about sex differences found in previous studies using self-report vs. performance measures of EI. Moreover, it may contribute to shed light on the nature-nurture debate and on the role of meta-emotional variables for explaining sex differences in EI.
Keywords: Emotional intelligenceMeta-emotional intelligenceSexAgePre-adolescenceAdolescence
4. Discussion
Our results demonstrate that there are many differences in girls' and boys' emotional and meta-emotional intelligence and that they are also influenced by age. Even if effect sizes are small, these differences are quite systematic, and we consider them noteworthy. Consistently with previous literature (Curci & D'Amico, 2010; Cabello et al., 2016; Day & Carroll, 2004; Fernández-Berrocal et al., 2012; Gutiérrez-Cobo et al., 2016; Mayer et al., 1999; Mayer et al., 2002; Rivers et al., 2012) and with results already obtained by D'Amico (2013), girls score better than boys in ability-EI, and this is particularly evident in adolescent group. Results of emotional self-concept presents an opposite pattern, with boys reporting higher score than girls in both groups of age and in particular in the adolescent group and that is consistent with some studies (Khan & Bat, 2013; Petrides & Furnham, 2000). Differently from what found by D'Amico (2013), there are no sex differences in self-rating about performance scale, indicating that when specific emotional tasks are considered, boys and girls are equally accurate in evaluating own performance. However, the age-group differences in self-rating about performance indicates that, independently from sex, adolescents are more parsimonious and critics in evaluate their own performance than pre-adolescents. This is consistent with results found by D'Amico (2013) in standardization sample, indicating that scores in self-rating about performance scale were negatively related to age (r = −0.152, p < .005). Girls show to own higher levels than boys in meta-emotional knowledge and boys systematically overestimate their emotional ability in everyday situation. This result is particularly evident among adolescents, where boy overestimate and girls underestimate their emotional abilities. In preadolescents' group, both sexes overestimate their abilities, but again the overestimation is higher for boys than for girls.
Concerning meta-emotional self-evaluation, independently by sex, pre-adolescents overestimate their performance in the ability test more than adolescents. However, there are sex and age differences in the direction of estimation: in pre-adolescents' group, both boys and girls tend to overestimate their performance, in adolescents' group, boys overestimate and girls underestimate their performance in the ability test. Finally, consistently with D'Amico (2013) we found that girls, in both age groups, scored higher than males in meta-emotional beliefs.
These results give rise again to the famous debate on nature and culture: by evidencing that the gap among sexes is higher in older than in younger group, they seem to give more weight to the culture pole. As previously argued, probably more and more over their life, culture might influence sex difference in term of the different styles that boys and girls adopt in sharing their emotion with others: typically, women compared to men feel the need to share their problem with others. These differences in what we could define as coping strategies (coping/isolation vs. coping/sharing) are likely to be at the basis of EI differences, especially in the case of measurement tools, like MSCEIT or IE-ACCME ability test, that are scored using the consensus criterion. As it is well known, the consensus criterion foresees that, in the ability test, the score assigned to each answer corresponds to the percentage of subjects who consider that answer valid. In other words, the “best” answers are those chosen by the largest number of subjects (i.e., the statistical mode). This procedure implies that people who obtain higher scores in emotional intelligence are not better than others but, rather, more similar to the rest of the population in the way they feel emotions. In this perspective, D'Amico (2018) defined ability EI as the ability of tuning with others or, in other word, to elaborate emotional experience like others. Thus, the tendency of little girls, teenagers and then women, to share their emotions with peers, and to listen to other's emotional issues, could generate their higher ability to tune with others, and it could be therefore the basis for this form of intelligence that is substantiated by feeling emotions like others and not differently from others. On the contrary, boys and men are probably less inclined to share emotions with others and to participate to personal and social building of emotional consensus. This could be an obstacle in developing adequate perspective taking abilities and the ability to tune with others.
As already said, the reason for many boys and men being less inclined to share their emotions with others probably stems from education and culture. Indeed, this style increases with age: on the other hand, almost in all cultures boys are expected, even as children, to be less sensitive than girls. Boys are expected not to cry, not to show or share emotions and to follow reason. On the contrary, girls are expected to follow feelings and to talk about emotions, and this expectation probably turn in a real lifelong “exercise of emotions”. However, our results seem to demonstrate that girls are not aware of their high emotional ability. Indeed, consistently with claims by Ciarrochi and colleagues, adolescent girls show an underestimation bias, since their emotional self-concept is lower than the abilities that they show in the ability test. A similar even if opposite pattern is showed by boys in adolescents' group, showing a stable overestimation bias in meta-emotional knowledge, with an emotional self-concept higher than the abilities that they show in the ability test. The same biases are observed also concerning the meta-emotional self-evaluation, with boys tending to overestimate and girls to underestimate their performance in the ability test.
In general, it seems that neither boys nor girls, with a very slight difference in pre-adolescents' and adolescents' groups, show a proper awareness of their emotional abilities. Indeed, both overestimation and underestimation reflect poor awareness of one's own emotions and may have negative effects on individual personal life. The overestimation of one's own emotional abilities might lead adolescents to copy with situation they are not able to manage; underestimation of their emotional abilities might lead them to avoid those situations that they could be able to front, reducing the experiences of success and in general their self-efficacy.
In our previous study on the relationship between emotional and meta-emotional intelligence and sociometric status (D'Amico & Geraci, 2021) we demonstrated that pre-adolescents with higher levels of ability EI, meta-emotional knowledge and meta-emotional self-evaluation are more accepted by others while those that overestimate their emotional abilities are more refused by peers. For this reason, we claimed that, for social relationships, the most “dangerous bias” in evaluating one's own emotional abilities is the overestimation. In this sense, based on our results, boys might be statistically more at risk for social rejection by peers than girl.
On the other hand, the tendency to underestimate may be likewise dangerous for girls. Indeed, we know from literature (Miao et al., 2016) that people perceiving themselves as emotional intelligent, tend to perceive general positive affect, such as feeling active, alert, and energetic at any given moment in time, whereas people who perceive themselves as poor in emotional intelligent tend to experience negative affect. Thus, on the basis of our results, girls might be statistically more at risk for negative affect and this could also help to explain, along with other neurobiological factors, the prevalence for anxiety (Jalnapurkar et al., 2018) and depression (Labaka et al., 2018) in females when compared to males. Overestimation and underestimation errors might be also a side effect of the different degree of importance that boys and girls give to emotions in everyday life. Our results in meta-emotional beliefs seem to corroborate this view. Indeed, girls show higher scores than boys, demonstrating they own a belief's systems about emotions that is consistent with current scientific knowledge on emotional intelligence. In other words, girls believe more than boys that emotions count, and the importance given to emotions could lead girls to never consider themselves good enough in the emotional field.
4.1. Limitations and future directions
We are aware that our study presents some limitation that could be overcome in future studies. Firstly, it could be useful to examine sex differences in a wider range of age groups, and in particular in younger children, in order to see if sex differences are less evident in children than in pre-adolescents. Definitely, longitudinal studies in which emotional and meta-emotional intelligence are measured during transition from childhood to adulthood may give very important insights on their developmental trend. We are also aware that this study is about sex differences and that sex does not always corresponds to gender identity and sexual orientation. For instance, the study focusing on emotional intelligence and sexual orientation realized by Mîndru and Năstasă (2017), evidenced higher levels of both self-reported EI and ability EI in adults with homosexual orientation compared to those with heterosexual orientation. It is not clear to what extent this could be related to results about sex differences and, however, only one study is not enough for making clear conclusions. Moreover, due to the novelty of the paradigm, there is actually no information about meta-emotional intelligence in people with different sexual orientation. Thus, future studies should focus on differences in emotional and meta-emotional intelligence of adolescents and adults that differ not only for biological sex but also for gender identity and sexual orientation. We wonder if gender identity and sexual orientation, more than biological sex, may also predict size and direction of meta-emotional knowledge and meta-emotional self-evaluation.
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