Nursing is a special profession closely related to people’s health and life. Many nurses are facing a series of stressful situations, such as emotional exhaustion, low self-efficacy, low personal achievement, and low life satisfaction (Molero Jurado et al., 2019). Life satisfaction refers to the degree of subjective satisfaction generated by individual needs and wishes in various aspects (Diener, 1985). A recent study of nursing staff demonstrated that nurses who were dissatisfied with their lives were more likely to suffer from psychological disorders, with a risk as high as 2.4 times (Zakeri et al., 2021). Numerous studies have discovered that nurses’ life satisfaction is associated with resilience, gratitude disposition, job satisfaction, compassion, and self-efficacy (Yu and Lee, 2018; Zakeri et al., 2021; Milutinović et al., 2022). Furthermore, life satisfaction is positively correlated with occupational burnout, and nurses with low life satisfaction are prone to occupational burnout (Zborowska et al., 2021). Therefore, improving the life satisfaction of nurses is very important for them to maintain their careers and promote mental health.

Emotional intelligence refers to a series of ability that helps individuals accurately evaluate and understand the emotional needs of themselves and others, and rationally use emotional information to promote cognitive activities (Salovey and Mayer, 1990). A study on student registered nurse anesthetists found that emotional intelligence can help nursing students reduce the impact of negative emotions on important decisions, and positively impacts the care they provide (Christianson et al., 2021). Meanwhile, a study on Spanish nurses indicated that emotional intelligence can reduce nurses’ burnout and psychosomatic complaining, while protecting them from the negative effects of psychosocial risks and positively affecting their job satisfaction (Soto-Rubio et al., 2020). Similarly, a prior study confirmed that emotional intelligence directly predicts nurses’ life satisfaction, which means that nurses with high emotional intelligence may be more satisfied with their lives (Montes-Berges and Augusto-Landa, 2014). Thus, the hypothesis is proposed:

Self-efficacy is the belief that a person can accomplish a task or achieve a goal (Deer et al., 2018), which is considered a judgment made by nursing students about their ability to handle various tasks (Arribas-Marín et al., 2021). The factor affects nurses’ motivation, actions, and behaviors during patient care (Cziraki et al., 2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic, self-efficacy was also considered beneficial to Chinese frontline nurses’ psychological health, which can effectively reduce their anxiety and depression (Hu et al., 2020). Moreover, research on medical professionals demonstrated that emotional intelligence is positively associated with self-efficacy; that is, the stronger the emotional management ability, the stronger the self-efficacy (Zeb et al., 2021). Furthermore, researchers also found that nursing students’ self-efficacy directly affects life satisfaction (Arribas-Marín et al., 2021). When nurses have a high sense of self-efficacy, they work efficiently in demanding situations, maintain good stress management skills, and ultimately improve life satisfaction. Therefore, we propose the assumption:

Resilience means an individual capacity to adapt to adversity, trauma, and other major stressors (Aburn et al., 2016). Nurses’ resilience has been considered a skill that can help nurses overcome difficulties in the workplace (Young and Rushton, 2017), which contributes to improving healthcare quality and ensuring the sustainability of the healthcare system (Epstein and Krasner, 2013). Meanwhile, resilience has been thought to be positively correlated with emotional intelligence among critical care nurses (Lampreia-Raposo et al., 2022). Furthermore, a randomized controlled trial demonstrated that nurses’ resilience can be improved by emotional intelligence training (Mao et al., 2021). In addition, high levels of nurses’ resilience can act as a protective factor against adverse outcomes, such as burnout, anxiety, and depression (Baskin and Bartlett, 2021), it also can improve nurses’ job satisfaction (Brown et al., 2018), quality of life (Alhawatmeh et al., 2021), general well-being (García-Izquierdo et al., 2018), and life satisfaction (Labrague, 2021). Therefore, We hypothesize that:

Numerous studies have depicted that emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, and resilience are positively associated with job satisfaction, well-being, and life satisfaction among nurses (Yu et al., 2019; Li et al., 2021; Platania et al., 2022). Researchers pointed out that self-efficacy directly predicts resilience in Chinese nurses, which assists them in dealing with changes and improving problem-solving ability (Ren et al., 2018). High levels of emotional intelligence endow nurses with a positive attitude toward frustration and increase their belief in coping with difficulties, which is also conducive to adapting to pressure, accelerating recovery from adversity, improving job satisfaction and happiness, and ultimately improving life satisfaction. Consequently, we pose the assumption:

In conclusion, while previous literatures have separately investigated the relationship between emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, resilience, and life satisfaction, few studies have depicted how emotional intelligence affects life satisfaction through self-efficacy and resilience. Thus, this study aims to explore the potential internal mechanism between these four variables, and even verify the intermediary role of self-efficacy and resilience.

Table 1 shows social demographic features and differences of nurses’ life satisfaction scores. Seven hundred and nine nurses met the inclusion criteria, the differences in life satisfaction scores among subgroups with different age, educational level, working years, nursing title, and marital status were statistically significant (P < 0.05).

The test results indicated that emotional intelligence positively affected the life satisfaction of nurses, which confirmed Hypothesis 1. Diener has pointed out that personality traits are very important to a person’s overall quality and often determine his/her life satisfaction (Diener, 1985). Emotional intelligence thought to be the power to process emotional problems, is strongly positively correlated with life satisfaction in different populations (Delhom et al., 2017; Kasler et al., 2022; Koca, 2022). Particularly in nursing professionals, emotional intelligence related to nursing work can promote positive organizational outcomes, such as preventing occupational burnout (Molero Jurado et al., 2018) and predicting engagement (Pérez-Fuentes et al., 2018). Emotionally intelligent nurses are usually more satisfied with life because they clearly know better ways to deal with the negative emotions that arise in the environment. Moreover, emotionally intelligent people are more likely to understand the emotions of others; that is, they can perceive better and more often feel satisfied when others have positive feelings toward them. At the same time, emotional intelligence also helps individuals explain the reasons for others’ actions and avoid other people’s dissatisfaction for various reasons; hence, they experience positive emotions more often (Escoda and Alegre, 2016). Emotional intelligence is a variable trait that can be enhanced through training course, just like empathy (Cunico et al., 2012). Developing the necessary strategies to regulate or manage individual emotions, and then emotional skills incorporating structures of emotional intelligence can help them better utilize emotional information, facilitating a high level of life satisfaction (Guasp Coll et al., 2020).

After age, educational level, working years, nursing title, and marital status were controlled, the findings revealed that self-efficacy mediated the relationship between emotional intelligence and life satisfaction (Path 1), supporting Hypothesis 2. The mediating effect accounted for 28.95%. In the prior study on nursing staff, self-efficacy greatly impacted anxiety and sleep disturbances during the COVID-19 pandemic (Simonetti et al., 2021) and even positively impacted all aspects of nurses’ general health (Dadipoor et al., 2021). Researchers found that emotional intelligence, working pressure, self-efficacy, and autonomy were of great significance in improving nurses’ job satisfaction and performance (Hwang and Park, 2022). Interestingly, emotional intelligence and self-efficacy are predictors of perceived stress in nurses facing various stressful situations (Molero Jurado et al., 2019). In fact, some researches confirmed that emotional intelligence can strengthen personal internal resources, which is also extremely important to person’s self-efficacy (Gharetepeh et al., 2015; Saeed and Ahmad, 2020; Chang and Tsai, 2022). Moreover, nurses with high emotional intelligence exhibited positive attitudes and strong self-efficacy, which can mitigate the effects of stress on burnout (Yao et al., 2018). Meanwhile, self-efficacy could also promote nursing managers to adopt more positive coping styles in high-pressure work environments and effectively improve their quality of work-life (Zhang et al., 2022), as well as life satisfaction (Hajek and König, 2019).

After age, educational level, working years, nursing title, and marital status were controlled, the results of this study also found that resilience partially mediated between emotional intelligence and life satisfaction (Path 2), with the mediating effect accounted for 23.68%, confirming Hypothesis 3. The more inclined nurses were to emotional intelligence, the stronger their resilience perception ability, which positively impacted their life satisfaction. Resilience, considered an important construct in positive psychology, was significantly correlated with stress, job burnout, and turnover intention of healthcare workers (Eley et al., 2018). Similarly, several factors related to resilience have been seen in research on nursing students, including self-efficacy, optimism, emotional intelligence, and self-care (Hughes et al., 2021). Prior findings have confirmed that the more emotionally intelligent a person is, the more resilient they are to effectively deal with adversity and challenges of high workloads and expectations (Sarrionandia et al., 2018; Chen, 2019). Additionally, resilience has been verified to reduce job burnout, regulate the overall health of nurses (García-Izquierdo et al., 2018), and directly affect the well-being and life satisfaction of nurses (Kim et al., 2019).

After age, educational level, working years, nursing title, and marital status were controlled, it was found that emotional intelligence and life satisfaction were continuously mediated by self-efficacy and resilience (Path 3), with the mediating effect accounted for 17.37%, confirming Hypothesis 4. Self-efficacy and resilience jointly promoted life satisfaction, with high emotional intelligence scores indicating that nurses can reduce the intensity and presence of negative emotions, promote positive coping styles, and maintain an optimistic attitude, which positively impacted the management of stressful situations and the prevention of burnout (Molero Jurado et al., 2019; Lu et al., 2022). Along this line, those nursing professionals with high emotional intelligence gradually formed a perception of competence, namely self-efficacy. As a positive psychological driver, self-efficacy helped individuals regulate their thinking processes, emotions, and behaviors, high levels of self-efficacy were related to better mental health and improved recovery from work stress and adversity (Hu et al., 2020). Self-efficacy enhanced the confidence of nurses to complete nursing tasks and the determination to achieve clinical goals. The self-efficacy of nurses also helped them cultivate and improve their resilience by viewing failures as challenges to learn instead of a threat to avoid (Yu et al., 2019). Personal resilience played a key protective role in dealing with negative situations and emotional disturbance caused by various workplace pressures (Bhattarai et al., 2021). At the same time, interventions to enhance resilience have been proven to reduce the mental burden of nurses and have positive effects on nurses’ well-being and life satisfaction (Janzarik et al., 2022). As nurses become more resilient to stressful work environments, their mental health improves, resulting in increased well-being and life satisfaction.

The survey indicated that emotional intelligence positively predicted the life satisfaction of Chinese nurses. In addition, it turned out that self-efficacy and resilience played a continuous intermediary effect between emotional intelligence and life satisfaction. According to the study, the influence of emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, and resilience on life satisfaction of Chinese nurses should not be ignored. On the one hand, nurses can participate in some training to strengthen the ability of emotional intelligence, so as to improve their sense of life satisfaction. On the other hand, nursing managers should provide nurses with a favorable working environment from the perspective of positive psychology, improve their sense of self-efficacy, enhance the capacity to cope with challenges and recover from stress, and ultimately improve their life satisfaction.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of Chengdu Fourth Hospital. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

YQ and JL was involved in all aspects of the study and preparation of the manuscript. DW was involved with the design of the study and preparation of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 82001444).

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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