Emotion Management Orientation and Training Exercises (EMOTE)

Army leaders face a wide variety of emotionally charged situations. Success in dealing with these situations requires that Army leaders manage their emotions and those of others. Army leaders, however, receive relatively little training in this area. Neither the Army Leadership Field Manual (FM 6-22) nor the Psychology Research literature provides a great deal of guidance regarding the trainable attributes (e.g., knowledge and skills) that are needed to manage emotions in oneself and others. One purpose of the proposed Phase I work is to compile and synthesize research from various domains in order to build a theoretical model depicting the nature of emotional management and the attributes that predict it. A second purpose will be to outline a strategy for testing the model empirically. This strategy will include scenario based assessment of key variables. The model will then inform a web-based training program, the Emotion Management Orientation and Training Exercises (EMOTE) program, that will help Army leaders to develop emotion-relevant knowledges and skills. We will also outline in Phase I a strategy for evaluating the EMOTE system.