Evaluation of emotional intelligence levels in healthy young adults

Emotional intelligence (EI) encompasses a group of abilities that are considered to be determinants of success both in personal and professional life. Gender, age, family and the environment are amongst the main factors that affect the development of EI. Recently, studies on EI have been conducted with different groups of individuals from the schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, veterinary medicine and engineers. However, we did not come across any studies that brought together all the different student groups from different study areas in a single study. The current study was aimed at investigating the relationship between EI scores of healthy young adults and their educational field. University students in Turkey were included in our study (n=256). The Turkish version of the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire was used to determine the EI scores of the volunteers. The study was administered online. Total EI scores of the participants in the natural and applied sciences, health sciences and social sciences were found to be 4.50±1.42, 4.45±1.19, 4.43±1.22 points respectively (p=.932). Similarly, the highest scores in Well-being, Self-control, Emotionality, and sociability subgroups were found in natural and applied sciences, and the lowest scores in health education students (p=.365, p=.678, p=.794, p=.441 respectively). As a limitation to our study, although the targeted number of participants could not be reached due to the pandemic, moderate differences between field of education and EI scores were observed. We believe that the results of the current study will be valuable for future research. Keywords: Emotional intelligence; University education, Education field