A study of the influence of nursing education on development of emotional intelligence

The Future of Nursing, Leading Change, Advancing Health (Institute of Medicine 2011) challenged the profession of nursing to assume leadership of interdisciplinary health care teams. Leading these teams requires cognitive ability to manage highly charged and emotional work. Emotional intelligence (EI) is a characteristic necessary to process emotional information for creative problem solving. In addition, emerging evidence indicates there may be an association of nurses' EI and quality patient care (K. Adams et al., 2011). The foundation for development of competencies essential for nursing practice begins with nursing education. This quasi-experimental study investigated if baccalaureate-level nursing education increased the level of EI as operationalized by J. D. Mayer and P. Salovey's (2004) four-branch abilities model. Findings indicated that senior nursing students scored higher on the ability to understand and reason about emotions over pre-nursing students (P < .05); however, pre-nursing students scored higher than senior nursing students on the ability to accurately perceive emotions (P < .05). Regression analysis found that self-estimated grade point average was the only significant predictor of overall EI. Although the senior nursing students demonstrated strength in the ability to reason about emotion, the ability to perceive emotion seemed to have declined. This problem requires further research and action through transformed nursing education.