Emotional competence and willingness to seek help from professional and nonprofessional sources

We sought to determine the relationship between emotional competence and wi llingness to seek help for emotional problems and suicidal ideation. A surv ey of 300 university undergraduates assessed emotional competence (skill at emotion perception, managing self-relevant emotions, and managing others' emotions), hopelessness, willingness to seek help from health professionals (e.g. counsellor) and nonprofessionals (friends, family), and perceived us efulness of past help-seeking experience. Those who reported feeling less s killed at managing emotions were less willing to seek help from family and friends for both emotional problems and suicidal ideation and less willing to seek help from health professionals for suicidal ideation. These relatio nships held even after controlling for hopelessness, sex, and past help-see king experience. Mediational analysis suggested that people low in managing others' emotions were less willing to seek help from professionals because they had had poorer experiences with mental health professionals in the pa st. There was no significant relationship between emotion perception skill and willingness to seek help. People most likely to be in need of help (tho se poor at managing emotions) were the least willing to seek it, and if the y did seek it, were the least likely to benefit from it.