Mindfulness Based Emotional Intelligence Training to Reduce Emotional Vulnerability for Medical Students

Abstract

Healthcare professional and students are one of the professional categories vulnerable to stress, anxiety, depression and burnout, and mindfulness-based interventions are used to reduce distress and vulnerability (Lomas et al., 2018; Parcover et al., 2018). A psychological construct also relevant for the well-being is emotional intelligence (Uchino et al., 2015). This article presents the results of an existing intervention, combining mindfulness techniques and emotional intelligence exercises (Mindfulness based emotional intelligence intervention - MBEIT, Ciarrochi & Godsell, 2006), used in small medical student’s sample, in order to advocate the use of this brief intervention for medical students in educational settings. The structure of the intervention follows the dimensions of psychological flexibility construct, with a time frame of two hours for each dimension: ‘Effective emotional orientation’, ’Mindfulness and Emotional Awareness’, ‘Defusing from unhelpful rules or evaluations‘, ‘Effective values orientation’ . The results of intervention show moderate effect size for the increase of emotional intelligence and of the psychological flexibility (emotional awareness, mindfulness and committed action).