@conference{
author = "Altaras Dimitrijević, Ana and Jolić Marjanović, Zorana and Krstić, Ksenija and Mojović Zdravković, Kristina and Nikitović, Tijana and Rajić, Milana",
year = "2023",
abstract = "This paper presents the rationale, main elements, and preliminary evaluation of a recently designed brief training in emotional intelligence (EI). The training was developed and delivered within Project PEERSolvers (https://peersolvers.f.bg.ac.rs/), as part of a broader program aimed at enhancing high school students’ teamwork and collaborative problem-solving capacities. The rationale for including EI as part of this program lies in the growing evidence from the fields of organizational and educational psychology, showing that EI contributes to the quality of interpersonal relations within the team, and thus, indirectly, to team effectiveness and productivity. The theoretical basis for developing the training was Mayer and Salovey’s four-branch model of EI: In other words, training activities were designed to support participants’ skills of perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions, with particular attention devoted to the latter two as the higher, “strategic” EI skills. In effect, the main part of the training consisted of solving and tweaking a series of three-piece “emotional puzzles”, drawing on the abilities to understand and regulate emotions. More specifically, participants were presented with a set of commonplace teamwork situations from the school context, all of which involved an emerging emotional problem (such as when students are working on a group project, but one team member is slacking off). Given this input as the first piece of the “emotional puzzle”, participants were asked to pair the situation with the most likely emotional reaction by its protagonists (e.g., being angry at the slacker), and infer the likely outcome for the team (e.g., conflict between team members and a failed project). Apart from being encouraged to see these cause-and-effect relations, participants were also prompted to consider how the same teamwork situation could be experienced differently by the “antagonist”, thus exercising their perspective-taking skills. In the final step of the “emotional puzzle” exercise, participants were introduced to an array of more or less adaptive emotion-regulation strategies, with the task of proposing a way for the protagonists to manage their emotional reactions (e.g., suspending anger by looking into the reasons behind someone’s slacking) so as to achieve a better outcome for themselves and the team. In addition to the above activities revolving around the “emotional puzzles”, the training also involved a briefing on how different emotions can be put to use in teamwork, as well as an exercise that builds participants’ emotional vocabulary and one that challenges their emotion recognition. The training has so far been delivered to a total of 126 students from six high schools in Belgrade, Serbia, receiving very positive evaluations: Participants have judged the skills targeted by the training to be highly relevant (with an average relevance rating of 3.58 on a 1–4 scale) and reported feeling highly competent after the training to understand and regulate emotions (the average competence ratings being 3.63 and 3.61, respectively). Training effects are currently being tested experimentally, while future directions involve differentiating training materials (e.g., the teamwork situations) so as to better match the experiences and interests of students from different types of high schools.",
publisher = "Foundation for Developing Emotional Intelligence",
journal = "Book of Abstracts, 5th Emotional Intelligence Week",
title = "A brief training in emotional intelligence to promote high school students’ teamwork and collaborative problem-solving capacities",
pages = "15-13",
url = "https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_reff_5770"
}
