Orzechowski, J. 1 , Smieja, M. 2 & Asanowicz, D. 2
1 Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities
2 Jagiellonian University
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is defined as the ability to process emotional information; hence, its relation to elementary cognitive processes should be strong. However, to date empirical findings in this area are disappointing. According to our previous studies, showing that EI level was related to some WM measures when the task of emotional information updating was used, we assumed that EI could be related to more complex rather than elementary cognitive performance. The aim of the current research is to prove the relationship between working memory updating (WMU) and EI. WMU, understood as the ability to maintain relevant representations of information changing over time, has been successfully used to predict higher cognitive abilities (e.g. fluid intelligence level). Therefore, we suppose that efficiency of WMU concerning complex emotional information will be positively related to EI level. We used n-back task with neutral and emotional visual content (International Affective Picture System), and paper-and-pencil test of EI in the study.