Emotional intelligence and affective events in nurse education: a narrative review

Objective To investigate the current state of knowledge about emotional intelligence and affective events that arise during nursing students’ clinical placement experiences. Design Narrative literature review. Data sources CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC and APAIS-Health databases published in English between 1990 and 2016. Review methods Data extraction from and constant comparative analysis of ten (10) research articles. Results We found four main themes: (1) emotional intelligence buffers stress; (2) emotional intelligence reduces anxiety associated with end of life care; (3) emotional intelligence promotes effective communication; and (4) emotional intelligence improves nursing performance. Conclusions The articles we analysed adopted a variety of emotional intelligence models. Using the Ashkanasy and Daus “three-stream” taxonomy (Stream 1: ability models; 2: self-report; 3: mixed models), we found that Stream 2 self-report measures were the most popular followed by Stream 3 mixed model measures. None of the studies we surveyed used the Stream 1 approach. Findings nonetheless indicated that emotional intelligence was important in maintaining physical and psychological well-being. We concluded that developing emotional intelligence should be a useful adjunct to improve academic and clinical performance and to reduce the risk of emotional distress during clinical placement experiences. We call for more consistency in the use of emotional intelligence tests as a means to create an empirical evidence base in the field of nurse education