Self-monitoring and Emotional Intelligence: A pragma-discursive study of impression management strategies in personal narratives

Abstract

Different dimensions of emotional intelligence and their effect on students’ academic performance have been extensively studied over the last decades (Abisamra, 2000; Hollander, 2012; Lawrence and Deepa, 2013; Patel, 2017; among many others). Although much has been done on defining the dimensions the concept of emotional intelligence comprises (Goleman, 1995; Javed and Nasreen, 2014), little attention has been paid to exploring the concept from a discourse perspective in a bid to throw light on how somebody’s emotional intelligence is actually managed discursively. By analysing the narratives of 71 university students, the present study aims to analyse not only the way(s) these students self-present in discourse, construct and negotiate their social identities, but also to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of the impression management strategies students deploy while describing a project they carried out which concerns the fight for gender equality. Results show that there seems to be a clear correspondence between the effective and the ineffective use of specific impression management strategies and the students’ emotional intelligence skills.