Emotional lexicon literacy as an index of emotional intelligence and a predictor of well-being and adequate social functioning.

Hypothesis: emotional literacy, indexed by how emotions are lexicalized and expressed in the language, is a component of emotional intelligence. In two studies about 500 Italian subjects, adolescents and young adults, performed various literacy tasks–e.g., produce synonims for both basic and complex emotions, and quantifiers to modify emotion intensity, duration and hedonic tone. The results showed that emotional lexicon literacy is an important skill, a viable partial index of emotional intelligence, significantly related to other emotional intelligence components (e.g., recogniton of facial expressions), and to measures of well-being and adequate social functioning (e.g., life satisfaction, loneliness).