Emotion understanding and management are core abilities of emotional intelligence, representing understanding of emotional information and knowledge of how to regulate emotions. However, surprisingly little research has examined how these abilities map onto the processes that occur in people's real daily lives, such as understanding the emotional impact of situations they are in and managing the ensuing emotions. The current research addresses this gap using the experience sampling method in two 5-day 30-occasion studies of five emotion regulation strategies, using the Situational Tests of Emotion Understanding and Management (STEU and STEM). In both Study 1 (N=165) and Study 2 (N=131), STEU and STEM scores related to between-strategy variability (using some strategies more than others, representing effective strategy selection) but only STEU scores predicted within-strategy variability (changing the strategies used across different situations, representing context-sensitive emotion regulation). Study 2 additionally operationalized context sensitivity as the variability in situation appraisals across the 30 occasions. Both STEU and STEM scores related to higher context sensitivity in each situation (between-appraisal variability), but not across situations (within-appraisal variability). Results demonstrate that emotional intelligence abilities are linked to two core processes involved in daily life emotion regulation: 1) context sensitivity and 2) emotion regulation flexibility.