The SELF-DISS is a recently developed measure of people’s propensity to enter into and to remain in abusive relationships (Atkinson & Vernon, 2018). It assesses people’s insecure attachment, their undeserving self-image, their self-sacrificing nature, and also provides a global score. In this presentation we test the hypothesis that people with high SELF-DISS scores will have low trait emotional intelligence (EI), particularly on such facets of EI as Assertiveness, Emotion Regulation, Relationships, Self-Esteem, Happiness, and Optimism. A sample of 351 adult women recruited from Canada and the United States via mTurk completed the SELF-DISS and the Trait EI Questionnaire; the TEIQue measures 12 facets and 3 factors of EI, as well as providing a global score. Both measures had good to excellent internal consistency reliability and, as predicted, were significantly and negatively correlated with one another. The correlations were somewhat lower than we expected, and we attribute this to the relatively homogeneous nature of the sample. Future directions will be discussed.
