Vanda Lucia Zammuner

Wellbeing: causes and consequences of emotion regulation in work settings.

Emotion regulation processes are a crucial aspect of the working role in jobs which require employee-customer interactions: What kinds of regulation processes are activated, with what frequency, and what are their correlates and consequences are important aspects to consider because of their potential implications for the well-being of individuals. To investigate these issues, a set of studies was carried out with Italian workers (N = 769) performing service jobs in different sectors. Job-related, socio-demographic, and individual psychological variables were taken into account. The results confirmed the hypothesis that in service job-roles emotional labour (EL) is a component whose negative and positive implications for employees’ well-being need to be considered. Emotional labour, embedded in a net of relationships with such job variables as frequency and duration of client-interaction, can result in high psychological costs for service workers. In particular, surface acting regulation was found to have a personal cost, indexed by the burnout dimensions of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.

Individual and cooperative computer-writing and revising: Who gets the best results?

Abstract Draft and revised computer-written narratives were produced by IV grade children in each of three writing conditions: I/I — individual/individual, i.e. the child wrote and revised his/her narrative individually; I/D — individual/dyad, the child wrote a text individually but revised it together with another child; D/D — dyad/dyad: two children wrote and then revised a text. A set of repeated measures analyses of variance showed that childrens revised narratives had more original and well-organized contents, described better story protagonists, used a more sophisticated language, contained fewer mistakes of various kinds and exhibited greater grammatical complexity than first drafts. The greatest changes from draft to revision occurred in the I/D condition; the greatest change within drafts occurred between the two individual drafts. Learning effects and effects due to cooperative writing were observed for a few parameters of text quality. The study shows that children, especially when they revise their text with a peer, are able to carry out both local and more global revisions and can do so even without explicit training.

Regulation of emotions in the helping professions: nature, antecedents and consequences

Abstract Do hospital employees regulate their emotions so they are in line with their job requirements? What effects do such regulation processes have on workers’ psychophysical wellbeing? What variables mediate their frequency, nature, and effects? To answer these questions, Italian men and women (N=180) working at a hospital as nurses, doctors, or in other technical roles, were administered a questionnaire comprising several scales, plus questions on socio-demographic and work-related variables. Results showed the regulation of felt emotions, that is, Emotional Labor (Hochschild, 1983) is a relevant variable of such jobs. Workers performed both (a) Surface Acting, that is, controlling expressed emotions so they are contextually adequate, and (b) Deep Acting, that is, trying to actually feel the required emotion; plus (c) Emotional Consonance, that is, effortlessly feeling the job-required emotions, was also a frequent experience for employees. Further, results showed the nature and frequency of such regulation processes have significant relations with both objective job-related features, such as the time spent in listening to patients, and with psychological variables such as burnout, and pleasurable emotions.

Emotional Intelligence Abilities and Traits in Different Career Paths.

Two studies tested hypotheses about differences in emotional intelligence (EI) abilities and traits between followers of different career paths. Compared to their social science peers, science students had higher scores in adaptability and general mood traits measured with the Emotion Quotient Inventory, but lower scores in strategic EI abilities using the emotional intelligence test MSCEIT, as well as neuroticism, and openness. Neuroticism mediated relationships between career path and EI traits but not EI strategic abilities. In the second study participants in science and business career paths had higher scores in positive affect and in several work-related EI traits and lower scores in work-related EI abilities than their science counterparts. The results raise questions about the mechanisms that may sustain the observed differences in self-perceptions and about the validity of some EI measures. They also have implications for EI skills assessment and training in Higher Education graduates and career starters.

The Social Regulation of Emotions in Jealousy Situations A Comparison between Italy and the Netherlands

Potential discrepancies between felt and communicated emotions elicited by two typical antecedents of jealousy that varied in terms of their seriousness were studied by means of a structured questionnaire. Italian (N = 301) and Dutch (N = 262) men and women attributed felt and shared emotions to a story protagonist. The emotions investigated included jealousy, anger, anxiety, sadness, insecurity, surprise, embarrassment, irritation, disgust, frustration, and depression. Event seriousness and nationality influenced the felt intensity of most emotions; sex influenced the intensity of only a few. Significant discrepancies between felt and shared emotions occurred for several emotions; jealousy was regulated by all respondents, and by Dutch subjects more than by Italians. Nation and sex significantly influenced the direction and magnitude of several observed discrep-ancies for one of the two antecedents only. The results supported our predictions that the ever bal communication of feelings about jealousy situations is subject to regulation. It is suggested that regulation is influenced by culture-specific norms and beliefs about social and personal implications of a given emotion.

Construct Validity of the Italian Version of the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) v2.0

In 2 studies, we assessed the construct validity of the Italian version of the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) version 2.0. In Study 1, we administered the MSCEIT together with measures of crystallized and fluid intelligence, personality, and affect. In Study 2, we administered the MSCEIT together with indexes of dispositional coping, emotion regulation strategies, alexithymia, state–trait anxiety, depression, and depressive rumination. We evaluated the factorial structure of the MSCEIT with a confirmatory factor analysis model using data combined from Study 1 and 2. The results confirm that the MSCEIT Italian version satisfactorily discriminates emotional intelligence ability from crystallized and fluid intelligence, personality, and affect, and exhibits significant correlations with various psychological well-being criteria. Furthermore, data from both studies confirm that the factorial structure of MSCEIT is consistent with the theory on which it is based, although it was difficult to rule out alternative structures.

Emotion regulation strategies and psychosocial well-being in adolescence

Abstract To study whether and how emotion regulation (EmR) strategies are associated with adolescents’ well-being, 633 Italian adolescents completed a survey that measured, using the emotion regulation questionnaire (ERQ), the strategies of cognitive reappraisal (CR) and expressive suppression (ES), and their relationship with several well-being measures. Factor analysis and reliability results confirmed the validity of ERQ to assess adolescents’ regulation strategies. Correlation and regression results showed that a greater reliance on CR was positively associated with better well-being outcomes for most indicators, especially life satisfaction, social support perception, and positive affect; greater preference for ES conversely was associated with lower well-being level for all indicators, including psychological health, emotional loneliness, and negative affect. Neither gender nor age differences were observed for CR and ES; CR and ES were positively correlated with each other. Both analysis of variance and regression results showed gender to be a significant factor for well-being indicators (e.g. males’ higher positive affect and life satisfaction than females’), whereas age was associated with differences in psychological health only, with 16-year olds reporting the lowest health, and 14-year olds the highest. The findings overall show that adolescents’ well-being is related to preferred EmR strategies, mirroring associations found in the adult population. The study results also suggest the need to further explore this relationship in adolescence.

Naive Theories of Emotional Experience: Jealousy

What do people know about emotions? How do they conceptualise them? Recent studies have focused on people’s knowledge of emotions and its structure by analysing self-reports about events that elicited a given emotion (e.g., Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson & O’Connor 1987; Scherer, Wallbott, & Summerfield 1986; Frijda, Kuipers, & ter Schure 1989; Parrott & Smith, 1991); judgements of similarities and differences among emotion terms (e.g., Shaver et al. 1987; Fehr & Russell 1984) or among emotional events (e.g., Harrison 1986); ratings of the “emotionness” of a given lexical term (e.g., Fehr & Russell 1984; Shaver et al. 1987; Zammuner, 1994a), or of other dimensions captured by the emotion lexicon such as intensity, hedonic tone, appraisal, action tendency or duration of the emotional experience (Davitz, 1969; Frijda, Ortony, Sonnemans, & Clore, 1992; Zammuner, 1994a); and so forth. The results of such studies show that people’s knowledge of emotions in general, and of specific emotions, is quite extensive: we, children included (e.g., Saarni & Harris, 1989), are able to recognize (basic) emotions in others by observing their facial expressions and their behaviours; we know what kind of situations typically elicits a given emotion; we know which emotions are subjectively pleasant or unpleasant, intense or mild, frequent or rare; we can predict that someone who feels a given emotion will feel or show certain behavioural and cognitive propensities or inclinations; and so forth.

Children’s writing of argumentative texts: Effects of indirect instruction

AbstractThis study reports on grade 4 children’s (Ss) knowledge of constraints and characteristics of persuasive written requests (RQ). i)All Ss wrote a first RQ asking money to improve their computer lab.ii)Experimental (E) and control (C) Ss evaluated 4 different RQ.iii)selected and ordered, out of 30 scrambled sentences, those appropriate for a “good” RQ.iv)A week later, E Ss had a collective “training discussion” on requests.v)A week later, E and C Ss wrote a second RQ asking money for their science lab. Results pertaining to different aspects of the produced RQ showed that the training did have some effects but both groups improved in their II RQ. The results were interpreted as suggesting that both groups actually learned what an appropriate request is by carefully evaluating the 4 requests and by constructing a request from a sentence list.

The Influence of Using a Word Processor on Children's Story Writing.

In this work we tested the hypothesis that using a word processor for some months might produce a shift in the text production strategies used by fourth grade elementary school children. Children were expected to focus more on decisions of higher-order level, and to postpone the lower-order level choices to the revision phase. 51 Italian children attending the fourth elementary school grade participated in the study. 28 children formed the experimental group; they used the computer for various activities throughout the school year. 23 children formed the control group — they simply followed the normal curriculum for that school grade.Comparisons of hand-written Pre-test and Post-test narratives by the two groups showed the existence of significant differences between stories written by the experimental group after the training with the word processor, and by the control group. The results support our hypotheses that experimental children write longer texts but make more grammatical errors than control children. There were instead no relevant differences between hand-written and computer-written stories by the experimental group. This result shows that the shift in strategies induced by the use of a word processor is resistent to a change in setting.