Stephane Cote

• University of Toronto

Romantic partners regularly sacrifice their own self-interest when partners' needs and preferences diverge. The present work examines the role of perceived partner responsiveness (PPR)-impressions that one's partner is understanding, caring, and validating-in positively shaping people's appraisals of their relational sacrifices. In Study 1, a prere...

As rates of intergenerational social mobility decline, it is increasingly important to understand the psychological consequences of entrenched socioeconomic privilege. Here, we explore whether current and childhood socioeconomic status (SES) are interactively related to entitlement, such that among currently high SES individuals, those from affluen...

When is accurately reading other people’s emotions costly and when is it beneficial? We aimed to identify whether the association between empathic accuracy and both relationship quality and motivation to change varies depending on the type of emotion being detected: appeasement (e.g., embarrassment) or dominance (e.g., anger). Romantic partners (co...

Prior research attributes the positive effects of passion on professional success to intrapersonal characteristics. We propose that interpersonal processes are also critical because observers confer status on and support those who express passion. These interpersonal benefits of expressing passion are, however, contingent on several factors related...

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a set of adaptive skills that involve emotions and emotional information. Prior research suggests that lower EI individuals behave maladaptively in social situations compared to higher EI individuals. However, there is a paucity of research on whether EI promotes adaptive decision-making. Leveraging the somatic marker...

Conflict is an emotional enterprise. We provide an integrative synthesis of theory and research on emotional dynamics in conflict and negotiation at three levels of analysis: the individual, the dyad, and the group. At the individual level, experienced moods and emotions shape negotiators’ cognition and behavior. At the dyadic level, emotional expr...

Prior research has attributed the positive relationship between passion and professional success to the inherent characteristics of passionate individuals. We propose that interpersonal processes also play a key role in this relationship because expressing passion for work leads observers to offer their support to passionate individuals. Integratin...

We describe an approach that enables a more complete evaluation of the validity of emotional intelligence measures. We argue that a source of evidence for validity is often overlooked by researchers and test developers, namely, evidence based on response processes. This evidence can be obtained through (a) a definition of the ability, (b) a descrip...

Historically high levels of economic inequality likely have important consequences for relationships between people of the same and different social class backgrounds. Here, we test the prediction that social affiliation among same-class partners is stronger at the extremes of the class spectrum, given that these groups are highly distinctive and m...

Historically high levels of economic inequality likely have important consequences for relationships between people of the same and different social class backgrounds. Here, we test the prediction that social affiliation among same-class partners is stronger at the extremes of the class spectrum, given that these groups are highly distinctive and m...

We investigate how parental income during one's upbringing relates to his or her effectiveness as a leader after entering an organization. Drawing on research on the psychological effects of income, social learning theory, and the integrative trait-behavioral model of leadership effectiveness, we propose a negative, serially mediated association be...

Significance Recent research finds that higher-income individuals are less generous than lower-income individuals. This work has received widespread academic and media attention, but the formulation is likely oversimplistic because it neglects the role of economic inequality. We test a new, multilevel perspective on the relationship between income...

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a set of abilities that pertain to emotions and emotional information. EI has attracted considerable attention among organizational scholars, and research has clarified the definition of EI and illuminated its role in organizations. Here, I define EI and describe the abilities that constitute it. I evaluate two approa...

Accumulating evidence suggests that effective communication and interpersonal sensitivity during interactions between doctors and patients impact therapeutic outcomes. There is an important need to identify predictors of these behaviors, because traditional tests used in medical admissions offer limited predictions of "bedside manners" in medical p...

Past research has found that showing anger induces cooperative behavior from counterparts in negotiations. We build on and extend this research by examining the effects of faking anger by surface acting (i.e., showing anger that is not truly felt inside) on the behavior of negotiation counterparts. We specifically propose that surface acting anger...

Though scholars have speculated for centuries on links between individuals' social class standing and approach to moral reasoning, little systematic research exists on how class and morality are associated. Here, we investigate whether the tendency of upper-class individuals to exhibit reduced empathy makes them more likely to resist intuitionist o...

In two experiments, we examined how a core dimension of emotional intelligence, emotion-understanding ability, facilitates decision making. Individuals with higher levels of emotion-understanding ability can correctly identify which events caused their emotions and, in particular, whether their emotions stem from events that are unrelated to curren...

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likel...

This chapter presents the premise that social class is a potent, robust, and distinct predictor of how people think and act in organizations. Drawing on theories of social cognition, I define social class as a dimension of the self that is rooted in objective material resources (via income, education, and occupational prestige) and corresponding su...

Personality constructs are typically conceptualized as central tendencies of the individual. We explore whether dynamic personality constructs that quantify the within-individual variability of behavior across situations and over time predict the closeness of social relationships. We focused on interpersonal spin, defined as the degree of dispersio...

Does emotional intelligence promote behavior that strictly benefits the greater good, or can it also advance interpersonal deviance? In the investigation reported here, we tested the possibility that a core facet of emotional intelligence--emotion-regulation knowledge--can promote both prosocial and interpersonally deviant behavior. Drawing from re...

Power increases the tendency to behave in a goal-congruent fashion. Guided by this theoretical notion, we hypothesized that elevated power would strengthen the positive association between prosocial orientation and empathic accuracy. In 3 studies with university and adult samples, prosocial orientation was more strongly associated with empathic acc...

We propose a new dimension of emotional intelligence (EI) that is particularly relevant in organizational settings: the ability to influence others via emotion displays. In this article, we first describe social functional accounts of emotions and the evidence supporting social effects of emotions. Then, we propose that individuals differ in the de...

Are people who are best able to implement strategies to regulate their emotional expressive behavior happier and more successful than their counterparts? Although past research has examined individual variation in knowledge of the most effective emotion regulation strategies, little is known about how individual differences in the ability to actual...

Lower social class (or socioeconomic status) is associated with fewer resources, greater exposure to threat, and a reduced sense of personal control. Given these life circumstances, one might expect lower class individuals to engage in less prosocial behavior, prioritizing self-interest over the welfare of others. The authors hypothesized, by contr...

Recent research suggests that lower-class individuals favor explanations of personal and political outcomes that are oriented to features of the external environment. We extended this work by testing the hypothesis that, as a result, individuals of a lower social class are more empathically accurate in judging the emotions of other people. In three...

We report the findings from two studies that examine the association between emotional intelligence and leadership emergence in small groups. In both studies, members of groups completed measures of emotional intelligence and other individual differences prior to working on a group project. Their peers rated their leadership emergence at the conclu...

Taking the “Intelligence” in Emotional Intelligence Seriously - Volume 3 Issue 2 - Stéphane Côté

Do expressions of anger in conflict elicit competition or cooperation? To reconcile inconsistent results obtained in previous research, the authors developed and tested a dual-process model that proposes that power and the appropriateness of the expressions of anger jointly determine whether an individual facing an angry antagonist competes by dema...

In organizations, it is common to talk about how wisely people manage their emotions. Even so, it is often not obvious whether a particular act of emotion regulation is wise or unwise and, to date, research has provided little guidance to judge the wisdom of emotion regulation efforts. We develop a model that construes wise emotion regulation as a...

The present study examines the role of trait affect in job search. One hundred and twenty-three university students completed measures of positive and negative affectivity, conscientiousness, job search self-efficacy, job search clarity, and job search intensity during their last year of school while on the job market. At the end of the school year...

This paper examines how emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence are associated with job performance. We develop and test a compensatory model that posits that the association between emotional intelligence and job performance becomes more positive as cognitive intelligence decreases. We report the results of a study in which employees com...

Prior studies on the association between weather and psychological changes have produced mixed results. In part, this inconsistency may be because weather's psychological effects are moderated by two important factors: the season and time spent outside. In two correlational studies and an experiment manipulating participants' time outdoors (total N...

Recent research suggests that moods influence the way people process information in applied settings. There is an ongoing debate, however, about the mechanisms by which mood influences the way information is processed. The present research explored the possibility that task goals, hedonic expectations of the task, and mood interact to predict syste...

The present study examined the effects of leaders' mood on (a) the mood of individual group members, (b) the affective tone of groups, and (c) 3 group processes: coordination, effort expenditure, and task strategy. On the basis of a mood contagion model, the authors found that when leaders were in a positive mood, in comparison to a negative mood,...

Emotion regulation abilities, measured on a test of emotional intelligence, were related to several indicators of the quality of individuals' social interactions with peers. In a sample of 76 college students, emotion regulation abilities were associated with both self-reports and peer nominations of interpersonal sensitivity and prosocial tendenci...

Organizations continue to employ the matrix organizational form as it enables companies to use human resources flexibly, produce innovative solutions to complex problems in unstable environments, increase information flow through the use of lateral communication channels, and leverage economies of scale while remaining small and task oriented. Desp...

The present longitudinal study explored the association between emotion regulation, defined as the conscious manipulation of one's public displays of emotion, and job satisfaction and intentions to quit. We predicated, based on an emotional dissonance model, that the suppression of unpleasant emotions decreases job satisfaction and increases intent...

Evolutionary accounts of vulnerability to depression have focussed either on the attachment system (Bowlby, 1980) or the social rank system (Gilbert, 1992; Price, 1972). According to a two-factor evolutionary model, depression-prone dependent and self-critical individuals suffer from insecurities regarding both attachment and social rank, but they...

The recent literature on affect and performance in organizations is reviewed. The evidence suggests that affect is a stronger predictor of job performance than is job satisfaction. Job performance can be predicted from both dispositional (i.e., long-term) and state (i.e., short-term) affect. Pleasant affect is associated with new dimensions of perf...

It was posited that the traits of Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness are predictors of dynamic intraindividual processes involving interpersonal behavior and affect. Hypotheses derived from the behavioral concordance model that individuals with high scores on a trait would experience more positively valenced affect when engaging in behavi...

Predictions from interpersonal traits to affect were examined in the context of 3 models. In the global trait model, traits were used to predict affect aggregated over a 20-day period. In the situational congruence model, traits were used to predict affect in trait-relevant situations. In the behavioral concordance model, the co-occurrence between...

Predictions from interpersonal traits to affect were examined in the context of 3 models. In the global trait model, traits were used to predict affect aggregated over a 20-day period. In the situational congruence model, traits were used to predict affect in trait-relevant situations. In the behavioral concordance model, the co-occurrence between...