How Emotionally Intelligent People Manage Their Emotions ⁠19%

By Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD⁠48% ABPP⁠53%

8/4/2026, 6:14:59 AM

BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Overconfidence Bias, Optimism Bias, and Negativity Bias, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 14% saturation with 131 hits. Analysis detected 1,084 faulty-reasoning hits from 933 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 26.5% and a BS Rank of ⁠19% (24,900 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 81.40% of the article peer group.

You’re upset with a close friend who suddenly pulls out of long-held dinner plans with only the briefest of excuses. 
This was going to be your chance to catch up on old times, and, what’s more, you changed your entire schedule to accommodate your friend. 
All of this makes you both tearful and angry. 
Rationally, you know you shouldn’t be so out of control. 
You and your friend have known each other for years, and there is almost certainly a good reason for this last-minute change in plans. 
This isn’t much help, though, as you run through all the possible ways you might have alienated your friend without realizing it. 
Or maybe your friend just doesn’t care as much about you as you thought. 
In any case, you’re about to send an angry text. 
## Emotional Intelligence and the Ability to Gain Self-Control 
According to new research by University of Sydney’s Riley Leckie and colleagues (2026), a simple cognitive process known as “monitoring,” or “metacognition,” could hold the key to emotional intelligence. 
Metacognition is what you go through when you recognize that there’s a gap between what you know and what you need to know. 
Once you can identify these gaps, you can plan how to get that needed knowledge. 
Maybe you’d like to learn a new hobby. 
You would begin by getting the materials you need, seeing if you can understand the instructions, and then taking it one step at a time. 
Without realizing it, you’re using metacognition as a strategy to accomplish your goals. 
Metacognition can extend to the realm of emotions, suggest the U. 
Sydney team. 
Monitoring could, they argue, enable people to “recognize shifts in emotion, evaluate their intensity and causes, and determine when regulation is needed.” 
It sounds pretty straightforward. 
However, research on this is lacking. 
Leckie et al. believe they can establish this link by seeing whether monitoring strategies used in a cognitive task could extend to, and even improve, emotional regulation. 
## Putting Metacognition’s Power to the Test 
First, the authors decided they needed to see whether there’s an association between metacognitive abilities and emotional regulation. 
Then, they sought to establish a causal link through an experimental test. 
To give you insight into the study’s methods, try seeing how you would respond to this scenario in the Situational Test of Emotion Management-Brief (STEM-B; Allen et al., 2015) : 
> “Andre moves away from the city his friends and family are in. 
He finds his friends make less effort to keep in contact than he thought they would. 
What action would be the most effec­tive for Andre?” 
The response options include: 
> a. 
Try to adjust to life in the new city by joining clubs and activities there 
> b. 
He should make the effort to contact them, but also try to meet people in his new city 
> c. 
Let go of his old friends, who have shown themselves to be unreliable 
> d. 
Tell his friends he is disappointed in them for not contacting him. 
The ratings of this item would place them in order from high to low as b, a, d, and c. 
How did you do? 
The metacognition task used a perceptual decision-making approach in which participants judged which of two briefly presented dotted squares contained more dots (they had half a second to make a judgment). 
Then they rated their confidence in their judgments, and this served as the score. 
The first study, which simply tested the association of these scores with STEM-B, only provided weak evidence for a connection. 
In the second study, the authors asked participants to engage in an emotion-regulation-specific task by having them rate their confidence in their responses to the STEM-B items. 
This manipulation showed that the simple act of making these ratings was enough to increase the quality of their responses. 
As the authors concluded, “eliciting confidence ratings may encourage participants to reflect more deeply on their responses, attend to relevant emotional cues, or evaluate the appropriateness of regulatory strategies in real time.” 
By recognizing whether and how a response might best suit an emotional situation, this kind of monitoring allows the individual to think harder before making a response. 
The beauty of this approach is, the authors maintain, its simplicity. 
You don’t need a great deal of training to learn the value of pondering the wisdom of your choice in an emotionally laden situation. 
## Putting Emotional Metacognition to Use 
With these findings in hand, we can now go back to the hypothetical situation in which your friend stood you up. 
Luckily, you haven’t sent the text yet, because it most likely would have reflected your sore feelings and wrecked the relationship. 
Using the U. 
Sydney findings as a guide, you could now stop and think about whether this is the best strategy. 
Might there be another way to express your disappointment without launching into a full-blown attack? 
Or, maybe you should consider a next-day follow-up, when whatever it was your friend was doing is over, and your own emotions have cooled. 
It’s probably not headline news that stopping and pausing before letting loose emotionally is generally a wise strategy. 
But knowing and following that strategy are two different things. 
What might be headline news from this study is that it doesn’t take much effort simply to ask yourself if you’re sure you’re reacting in the best way possible. 
**To sum up**, emotional intelligence doesn’t need to be a quality it takes years to achieve. 
All that good decision-making requires is a quick and easy reality check. 
Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 2.9%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 2.1%Psychology Today: 3.7%Confirmation Bias2.9%This article: 2.4%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.2%Psychology Today: 0.4%Anchoring Bias2.4%This article: 5.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.1%Psychology Today: 2.2%Availability Heuristic5.0%This article: 1.4%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.9%Psychology Today: 1.4%Representativeness Heuristic1.4%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.3%Psychology Today: 0.3%Hindsight Bias0.0%This article: 11.9%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 2.0%Psychology Today: 2.4%Overconfidence Bias11.9%This article: 2.1%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.1%Psychology Today: 2.2%Framing Effect2.1%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.5%Psychology Today: 0.4%Loss Aversion0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.4%Psychology Today: 0.4%Status Quo Bias0.0%This article: 2.7%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.3%Psychology Today: 0.1%Sunk Cost Effect2.7%This article: 10.4%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 7.8%Psychology Today: 3.5%Optimism Bias10.4%This article: 3.8%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.5%Psychology Today: 0.8%Pessimism Bias3.8%This article: 10.1%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 3.4%Psychology Today: 3.7%Negativity Bias10.1%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.2%Psychology Today: 0.5%Self-Serving Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.9%Psychology Today: 0.7%Fundamental Attribution Error0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.1%Actor-Observer Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.5%In-Group Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.2%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias0.0%This article: 0.8%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.7%Halo Effect0.8%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.0%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.0%Dunning-Kruger Effect0.0%This article: 4.4%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.3%Psychology Today: 0.7%Recency Bias4.4%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.2%Primacy Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.1%Blind-Spot Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.0%Ad Hominem0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.2%Straw Man0.0%This article: 14.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 4.3%Psychology Today: 4.3%Appeal to Authority14.0%This article: 5.4%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 2.5%Psychology Today: 2.1%False Dilemma5.4%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.5%Psychology Today: 0.5%Slippery Slope0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.3%Psychology Today: 0.3%Circular Reasoning0.0%This article: 9.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 8.4%Psychology Today: 7.3%Hasty Generalization9.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.1%Red Herring0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.3%Bandwagon0.0%This article: 2.1%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.2%Psychology Today: 1.8%Appeal to Emotion2.1%This article: 1.6%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.4%Psychology Today: 0.7%Begging the Question1.6%This article: 5.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.7%Psychology Today: 2.7%Post Hoc (False Cause)5.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.0%Tu Quoque0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.4%Burden of Proof0.0%This article: 1.9%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.4%Appeal to Nature1.9%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.2%Psychology Today: 0.5%Composition/Division0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.2%Psychology Today: 2.6%Anecdotal0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.2%No True Scotsman0.0%This article: 1.2%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 2.0%Psychology Today: 1.6%Ambiguity (Equivocation)1.2%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.0%Gambler’s Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.2%Psychology Today: 0.2%Middle Ground0.0%This article: 0.4%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.1%Psychology Today: 0.1%Personal Incredulity0.4%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.1%Special Pleading0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.0%Genetic Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.9%Psychology Today: 0.8%Unattributed Quote0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.6%Psychology Today: 0.4%Quote-first Misdirection0.0%This article: 8.4%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 1.6%Psychology Today: 3.0%Biased Writer Voice8.4%This article: 9.3%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 5.3%Psychology Today: 4.5%Indoctrination9.3%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.0%Politically Left Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.0%Psychology Today: 0.0%Politically Right Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD: 0.4%Psychology Today: 0.8%Attempt to Sell a Product or S
0.0%

933 words analyzed.

Speakers

1speaker12%attributed speech823writer words
Selected voice

Riley Leckie

100%flagged-word coverage
110 attributed words100% of attributed speech58% writer coverage
0%7.5%15.0%Indoctrination-10.6 ptsWriter: 10.6%Riley Leckie: 0.0%0.0%Biased Writer Voice-9.5 ptsWriter: 9.5%Riley Leckie: 0.0%0.0%

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.