The relationship of emotional intelligence with academic performance of university students

Background. The problem of the development of emotional intelligence and  the  search for its relationship with various factors remains relevant, since in modern research there are contradictory data on the nature of the relationship of emotional intelligence with academic performance.

Aims: to clarify the magnitude and sign of the relationship between the level of development of emotional intelligence of university students and their academic performance.

Materials and methods. Eighty-three 83 students from 18 to 47 years old participated in the study. They all were students of 1–4th years of bachelor’s degree in Moscow universities in the areas of “Psychological and pedagogical education”, “Pedagogical education with two training profiles”, “Pediatrics”, “Nursing”. The research method applied was a written survey (methods of D.V. Lyusin, N. Hall, questionnaire). The Spearman correlation method was used to study the relationship between variables.

Results. The sample was dominated by female undergraduate students (n = 75). The average level of emotional intelligence development prevails among students, the level of interpersonal emotional intelligence development is higher than the level of intrapersonal emotional intelligence development. The trend in increasing academic performance of master’s degree students in comparison with undergraduate students has been revealed. A correlation was found between students’ academic performance and general emotional intelligence (r = 0.331; p˂0.01). The closeness of the correlation between the components of emotional intelligence and academic performance is more pronounced in relation to interpersonal emotional intelligence (r = 0.3407) than to intrapersonal (r = 0.3251; p˂0.01).

Conclusion. We have found that the higher the level of academic performance of students, the higher the level of emotional intelligence; interpersonal emotional intelligence of students is more closely related to academic performance. 

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