Emotional Intelligence as a Predictor of Sense of Humor and Hope Among Adults

Emotions give sense about the rationality of actions and provide guidance if a specific behavior will be fruitful or not (Matthews, Zeidner, & Roberts, 2002). According to Mackin, (2006) in order to increase thinking and reasoning capabilities, a person needs emotions or sentiments. If an individual blocks emotions, he will lose the ability of logic, creativity and motivation to perform in a particular situation. Emotions are thought to be a complicated and rich form of knowledge and reasoning and this type of reasoning is known as emotional intelligence. Individuals who have high level of emotional intelligence can interact with community in affectionate and lively manner, adhere, resolve conflicts, manage their drives and can deal with self-encouragement and hope (Goleman, 1995). The present study is aimed at finding out predictability of sense of humor and hope on the basis of emotional intelligence of individuals.Tugade and Fredrickson (2001) explained that highly emotionally intelligent people perform successfully in a social circle. Such people have an ability to understand positive sentiments and can use these sentiments to deal effectively with negative stimuli. They can also use positive emotions to direct the goals and motivation towards goals. Hence, such people are optimistic and hopeful. Previous research indicates that emotional intelligence has an association with hope that helps to have an optimistic outlook on future life (Grayson, 2008). Hope is a mindsetthat is based on reciprocally resulting sense of successful (1 ) agency (will power to achieve goals) and (2) pathways (forecasting the ways to meet goals). Both are needed for positive thinking. Agency can also be described as an individual's motivation about his/ her personal success linked with the realization of goals. Pathway refers to a person's cognitive ability to make a plan about personal goals and make strategies to overcome obstacles in the pursuit of goals (Louis, 2008). Although these both components are reciprocal, additive and closely related with each other but they are not synonymous (Snyder et al., 1991). Hope is closely linked with emotional intelligence, because people who have low level of hope are unable to adjust mentally and thus emotionally, they have no ability to learn from their failure, thus cannot make future better (Michael, 2000; & Snyder, 1999). Researches also proved that people with high level of hope shows emotional passion, while those with lower level of hope show emotional tiredness (Snyder, 2000). Hope and emotional intelligence are valuable traits for leading a practical and professional life. Taksic and Mohoric (2006) proved the role of emotional intelligence in positive outcomes of life through their findings, which indicated significant relation of emotional intelligence with, coping with stress, maintaining positive mood, openness and many other important aspects of human life. While emotional intelligence helps to maintain positive mood, it has also found to be associated with sense of humor, which assist to cope with stress and emotional expression.As emotional intelligence is specialized to substitute positive emotions for negative ones, sense of humor also changes a person's mood. Furthermore, it has been revealed that four humor styles are also related with five traits of emotional intelligence. It was also noted that a positive humor style is related with high level of emotional intelligence, if only an individual has desire to understand emotions of himself and others. On the other hand, people who use negative styles of humor may also have lower level of emotional intelligence, but don't have awareness and understanding of emotions (Vernon, et al., 2009). Simpson and Weiner (1989) describe humor as choice of actions, communication or address, which provokes entertainment, happiness, joyfulness, wittiness and enjoyment. According to Thorson and Powell (1993), there are a number of characteristics that should be present in an individual to be humorous i. …