Bipolar Disorder and Its Effect on Emotional Intelligence
Bipolar disorder is a complex affective mood disorder that is characterised by cognitive and emotional abnormalities of the individual. This type of mood disorder affects an estimated 4.4% of U.S adults in their lifetime (The National Institute of Mental Health Information Resource Center). According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is generally defined as a mood disorder that in order to be diagnosed such as a person needs to experience at least 1 depressive, manic, or hypomanic episode. This specific disorder can and does inhibit an individual’s mental and physical capability along with specifically the social cognition of the individual. Emotional intelligence is a component of social cognition because “it involves the ability to monitor, recognize, and reason about about one's own and other people's emotions, but also to use this emotional information to guide one's thinking and actions (Salovey and Mayer, 1990)” (Varo et al., 2017).
We want to examine if emotional intelligence is affected when an individual has bipolar disorder during their adult years, 18 years and above. In this study, we examined emotional intelligence with bipolar individuals and non-bipolar individuals (individuals without any mental illness). The independent variables of this study are individuals who are diagnosed with either bipolar disorder I or II and individuals with no mental illnesses at all. The dependent variables of this study would be the scores on the surveys all the participants will take. We hypothesize that participants with bipolar disorder will score on each survey with a result that supports that bipolar individuals have a lower emotional intelligence than those of the population that is not affected by mental illness.
With this study we want to support the idea that people who are affected by mood disorders have lower control of their emotions and that affects interpersonal relationships by being able to show a correlation between bipolar disorder and emotional intelligence. With this support we can expand on an intervention program for those who are suffering from bipolar disorders. These interventions can help that population become aware that the lack of emotion and recognition of emotions is part of their neurological disorder and that it can be improved through therapy and clinical treatments.
Method
Participants
134 patients with bipolar disorder were recruited from mental health services in the Hartgrove Behavioral Health System in Illinois. These patients were picked due to their diagnosis of bipolar disorder type I or II by requirements as by the DSM-IV-TR, they must of between the age of 18 and 40, a score ≤6 on the Clinical Global Impressions (CGI) scale (Busner et al., 2007), speak fluent English, and have the ability to provide written informed consent (Varo et al., 2017).
There was an exclusion criterion that consisted of the exclusions if there was the presence of mental retardation in relation to an IQ score of <70 and severe organic disease. One hundred participants were recruited from the Chicago area via advertisements to join the study on public transportation (Chicago Transit Authority). Out of the 200 people that responded to the advertisements 150 meet the criterion for being able to participate in this study. The criterion for inclusion goes as follows: must be between the ages of 18-40, pass a standard background test, have no history of mental illness, have no physical or organic illness, and have not engaged in substance abuse (drugs, alcohol, etc) in over the last 3 months (David et al., 2014). 100 participants were then randomly selected to participate to be in the control group from those 150.
Materials
All participants from the study took the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (Mayer et al., 2003). The MSCEIT evaluates Emotional Intelligence (EI) through a series of multiple objective and impersonal questions. The MSCEIT’s questions are based on scenarios that can occur in everyday life in order to measure how well a person performs on tasks and how well they solve emotional based problems. There are four branches the MSCEIT measures of emotions which are perceiving emotions, facilitating thought, understand emotions, and managing emotions. All participants also took the Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale (Gratz et al., 2004). The DERS is a self report scale with 36 items that assess the “non-acceptance of emotional responses, difficulties engaging in goal directed behaviours when experiencing negative emotions, difficulties in impulse control, lack of emotional awareness, limited access to emotion regulation strategies and lack of emotional clarity across six subscales” (Van Rheenen et al., 2014 ). The higher the score the more difficult emotion regulation is to the individual.
Procedure
Over the course of three months all participants in both groups were administered both the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence test and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale. Participants were scheduled to come into the research lab to complete the surveys on different days and it was a mix between both the bipolar patients and non-bipolar patients. Each of the sample groups were placed into seperate rooms to complete the surveys. There was no limited time to fill out the surveys, so participants could take as long as they needed to reflect over each statement and/or question asked.
Results
The sample group of bipolar patients consisted of 134 patients with bipolar disorder type bipolar disorder type II. The sample group with non-bipolar participants consisted of 100 people with no bipolar disorder or any other mental and/or physical illness. Compared to non-bipolar subjects, bipolar patients showed significantly lower levels in emotional intelligence. There was a correlation between the dependent variable, both sample groups results from the surveys, and the independent variable, bipolar individuals and non-bipolar individuals. People with either bipolar disorder I or II scored higher on the DERS than those with no disorder at all, and scored lower on the MSCEIT than the non-bipolar group.
Discussion
In this current study, we compared the results of the MSCEIT and the DERS between bipolar patients and non-bipolar individuals. It was expected that individuals diagnosed with a bipolar disorder I or II would have a lower functioning emotional intelligence than individuals of the normative population. We found that patients with lower scores on the MSCEIT showed worse neurocognitive performance in relation to the sample group of non-bipolar participants. (Varo et al., 2017). We also observed that the DERS scores of the bipolar patients were lower significantly than the non-bipolar participants as well (Van et al., 2014).
Our results suggests that there may be an indication of a relationship between psychosocial functioning and MSCEIT performance because a lower score is related to greater functional impairment (Varo et al., 2017). Another conclusion that came from our results is that the severity of bipolar disorder does not have a large impact on emotional intelligence, although the disorder as a whole does.Consistent with out prediction, the results of our study showed that there is a correlation between emotional intelligence and bipolar disorder I and II.
Some limitations of the study were that there could not be no exact cause and effect relationship between emotional intelligence and the neurocognitive disorder because of the cross-sectional design of this study. Also the disproportion of group sizes between bipolar individuals and non-bipolar individuals. Another limitation to consider would be that within the bipolar sampe group each patients has a difference in severity of the disorder and that might not accurately represent all individuals who suffer from bipolar disorders. With this in consideration it does limit the generalizability of our results.