Department of Developmental Psychology and Education, Faculty of Education Science, University of Huelva Huelva, Spain.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Castilla-La Mancha Albacete, Spain ; Clinical Research Unit of the Integrated Healthcare Office of Albacete, Paraplegics National Hospital Fundation Albacete, Spain ; Applied Cognitive Psychology Unit, Neurological Disabilities Research Institute (IDINE), University of Castilla-La Mancha Albacete, Spain.
Front Aging Neurosci. 2014 Mar 11;6:37. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2014.00037. eCollection 2014.
Numerous studies have suggested that educational history, as a proxy measure of active cognitive reserve, protects against age-related cognitive decline and risk of dementia. Whether educational history also protects against age-related decline in emotional intelligence (EI) is unclear. The present study examined ability EI in 310 healthy adults ranging in age from 18 to 76 years using the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). We found that older people had lower scores than younger people for total EI and for the EI branches of perceiving, facilitating, and understanding emotions, whereas age was not associated with the EI branch of managing emotions. We also found that educational history protects against this age-related EI decline by mediating the relationship between age and EI. In particular, the EI scores of older adults with a university education were higher than those of older adults with primary or secondary education, and similar to those of younger adults of any education level. These findings suggest that the cognitive reserve hypothesis, which states that individual differences in cognitive processes as a function of lifetime intellectual activities explain differential susceptibility to functional impairment in the presence of age-related changes and brain pathology, applies also to EI, and that education can help preserve cognitive-emotional structures during aging.
许多研究表明，教育史作为积极认知储备的替代指标，可以预防与年龄相关的认知衰退和痴呆风险。教育史是否也能预防与年龄相关的情商（EI）下降尚不清楚。本研究使用 Mayer-Salovey-Caruso 情绪智力测验（MSCEIT），对 18 至 76 岁的 310 名健康成年人进行了能力 EI 测试。我们发现，总 EI 以及感知、促进和理解情绪的 EI 分支，老年人的得分均低于年轻人，而年龄与管理情绪的 EI 分支无关。我们还发现，教育史通过中介年龄与 EI 之间的关系，保护人们免受这种与年龄相关的 EI 下降。具体来说，受过大学教育的老年人的 EI 分数高于受过小学或中学教育的老年人，与任何教育水平的年轻成年人的分数相当。这些发现表明，认知储备假说认为，由于终身智力活动导致的认知过程的个体差异，可以解释在年龄相关变化和脑病理学存在的情况下，功能障碍的不同易感性，这一假说也适用于 EI，并且教育可以帮助在衰老过程中保持认知情感结构。
