Emotional intelligence, emotions, and feelings of support staff working with clients with intellectual disabilities and challenging behavior: an exploratory study.
Staff who stay calm and flexible feel slightly less stress when clients act out.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked support staff to fill out two surveys. One measured emotional intelligence. The other asked how they felt at work.
All staff worked with adults who had intellectual disability and showed hitting, screaming, or self-injury.
What they found
Staff who scored high on stress management and adaptation felt slightly better on the job. The link was small but real.
Other parts of emotional intelligence, like reading other people’s feelings, did not matter much here.
How this fits with other research
Lambrechts et al. (2009) and Griffith et al. (2012) already showed that staff grow angry or sad when clients hit or scream. Those papers blamed the way staff think about the behavior. The 2013 paper keeps the emotion focus but swaps "thoughts" for "emotional skill."
van Timmeren et al. (2016) later added self-efficacy to the mix. They found confidence plus emotion predicts good staff style, building on the weak link Capio et al. (2013) first showed.
Eisenhower et al. (2006) could not prove that staff anger leads to less help. Capio et al. (2013) do not test helping either, so the two null results line up. Together they warn: emotion alone does not decide what staff do next.
Why it matters
You can’t re-wire staff personality, but you can teach stress tactics. Run short drills on deep breathing, quick breaks, and reframing crises as data, not personal attacks. These micro-skills target the exact emotional-intelligence slice this paper links to lower stress. Add them to your next in-service and track who uses them when the yelling starts.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Open your next team huddle with a two-minute belly-breathing drill and post the break-room card 'Pause, Breathe, Data'.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Working with clients who show challenging behavior can be emotionally demanding and stressful for support staff, because this behavior may cause a range of negative emotional reactions and feelings. These reactions are of negative influence on staff wellbeing and behavior. Research has focused on negative emotions of staff. However, a distinction between emotions and feelings has never been made in the research field of intellectual disabilities. Negative emotions and feelings may be regulated by emotional intelligence, a psychological construct that takes into account personal style and individual differences. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between emotional intelligence on the one hand and emotions and feelings on the other. Participants were 207 support staff serving clients with moderate to borderline intellectual disabilities and challenging behavior. Emotional intelligence, emotions, and feelings were measured with questionnaires. The results show that emotional intelligence, emotions, and feelings are related. However, found relationships were weak. Most significant relations were found between feelings and stress management and adaptation elements of emotional intelligence. Because the explored variables can change over time they call for a longitudinal research approach.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.08.027