Professionals in human services can face emotionally challenging situations in their work settings. Staying balanced, when encountering emotional issues, is a desired capacity for human services providers. Emotional intelligence has been found to positively influence people's abilities to manage emotions as well as general well-being and health. Expressive writing can also help human service providers to regulate and process emotions potentially increasing emotional intelligence. The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationships of negative emotions, shyness, emotionally expressive writing and emotional intelligence among undergraduate rehabilitative services students and related majors. Results showed significant moderate inverse correlations between emotional factors of optimism, depression, and stress with emotional intelligence. Similarly, expressive writing was positively correlated with social skills, reader consciousness and conflict resolution. Recommendations for human services providers training programs are discussed with regards to enhancing areas of student emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence as a skill may improve services delivery for human services clients.
