Scientific article summaries and their role in research

¶ … Emotional Intelligence and Patient-Centered Care" is a 2007 publication from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine which seeks to discover whether or not Emotional Intelligence (EI) can be of use in the health care industry. Emotional Intelligence is a personal characteristic that some have identified as linked to the successful ability to form interpersonal relationships with patients in order to benefit the patient's interaction in the health care system. This would not only include a patient's experience when visiting health care professionals, but also the patient's increased overall health benefits such as being healthier and living longer. The authors stated purpose is to examine whether Emotional Intelligence, when adapted to the idea of patient-centered care, can be of assistance in the health care system.

Emotional Intelligence is defined as "a set of abilities (verbal and non-verbal) that enable a person to generate, recognize, express, understand and evaluate their own and others' emotions in order to guide thinking and action and successfully cope with environmental demands and pressures." (Birks, 368-369) But the authors also state that there is a fundamental problem of trying to quantify, or measure, EI. But as EI has been proposed by some as being beneficial to patient care, the authors attempt to discover if there are any tangible benefits. When researching the effects of EI in health care, job satisfaction and performance, training and curriculae, and recruitment in the system, the authors found that there was a lack of evidence to suggest that EI plays a valuable role in any of these aspects of the health care system. The authors also point out that there has not been a sufficient amount of research conducted so far which can definitively dismiss the potential value of EI, and that much more study must be conducted. Finally, the authors end their article with a series of potential questions that they feel need to be answered in order to fully understand the effect of EI on patient-centered care which ask what is being measured when measuring for EI, how this is to be accomplished, is there a link between EI and patient outcome, does EI affect the system, and can EI be learned or improved?

The second article, entitled "Increasing Emotional Intelligence: (How) is it Possible?," discusses the research conducted to discover whether or not Emotional Intelligence (EI) is something that a person can learn, or improve their natural skills. This study, published 2 years after the first, asserts that the debate on EI has "given birth to a tripartite model of EI." (Nellis 36) This model divides EI into three aspects: knowledge, ability, and practice. Overall, the authors assert that EI is an integral element for happiness and success in life. Because of it's seeming importance in a person's life, the authors' goal in this study was to determine if EI can be increased through training, and to discover if the person's initial level of EI effected the benefit they gained from the EI training. The study consisted of a number of questionnaires and tests conducted on the participants three times, then the participants engaged in four sessions of EI training, and then conducted the questionnaires and tests three times again. Six months later, the participants were then subjected to a long-term post training evaluation to determine if the training had translated into applied skills.