In response to healthcare reform, nursing education needs to expand beyond linear thinking and towards conceptual thinking as patients' needs become more complex. Concept mapping is an interactive visual tool that may encourage many cognitive and emotive processing tasks. The aim of this study was to explore the effectiveness of concept mapping in improving Jordanian nursing students' emotional intelligence. A two-group, pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental research design was used in this study. One hundred fifteen nursing students from a university participated in this study. Emotional intelligence was improved significantly in nursing students who were exposed to the concept mapping (n = 58) than nursing students in the control group (n = 57). Schutte emotional intelligence scale indicated F (1, 109) = 47.66, P < 0.001, partial n[superscript 2] = 0.53. Findings support the importance of students' centred pedagogies in improving students' emotional intelligence as they feel more confident with the learning process.