UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Course overview

Emotional intelligence is generally defined as being able to recognize and manage emotions, understand how emotions work, and manage emotions in social relationships. Emotional intelligence appears central to the work of healthcare professionals. Health care professionals have to be insightful and empathic in often-volatile and complex social situations while being aware of and controlling their emotions of anger, embarrassment, frustration, and even fear. Low levels of emotional intelligence can create problems. As noted by Morrison 2007, the most troubling and intractable situations exist when performance difficulties occur in the context of staff who lack accurate empathy, self-awareness, and self-management skills. The lack of emotional competence renders specific performance problems, such as poor recording practice, all but unmanageable. Healthcare professionals, have high-stress jobs that can take a mental and physical toll, leading to low job satisfaction, high numbers of sick days, and burnout. Training in emotional intelligence can promote better healthcare practice. This INR Continuing Education seminar will explain how perceptions, thinking, emotions, and memories create personality structure outline the characteristics of emotions and their importance in human social behavior, discriminate between positive and negative emotions and moods, explain the effects of Type 1 Emotional Thinking and Type 2 Rational thinking on provider-patient relationships, list the five major domains of emotional intelligence and their application to healthcare professions, determine the effects of emotional intelligence and social intelligence on love, happiness, everyday life, and job performance and satisfaction, describe how to improve self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and professional and personal relationship management, explain how emotional intelligence impacts mental disorders, chronic illness, clinical effectiveness, and stress management, describe how emotional intelligence can improve provider-patient relationships, clinical treatment outcomes, job satisfaction, and leadership/management in the healthcare workplace, outline how the information in this course can be utilized to improve patient care and patient outcomes, and describe, for this course, the clinical practice implications for dentistry, mental health, and other health professions