Abstract
Objectives. This study builds on previous validation studies of the Emotional Intelligence Diagnostic Tools, the Emotion Recognition Test-ERT and the MSCEIT, which serve to identify and develop their individual components.
Emotional intelligence is an important competency (not only) of the working population. The main objective is to test the assumption of higher emotional intelligence competence in psychology students compared to the general population.
Method. The data collection was carried out between April 2020 and March 2021 in two waves on a specific sample of psychology students at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague.
For the purposes of the study, second-year psychology students were approached with the possibility of completing the following emotional intelligence tools: the ERT (Bahbouh & Fabianova, 2019), MSCEIT (Mayer et al. 2012), and EQ-i (Bar-On,1997). The main research question is whether students perform above average on tests of emotional intelligence relative to the general population on various diagnostic tools that operationalize emotional intelligence.
Results. Based on the collected data, t-tests were used to compare the results of psychology students with the general population to whom the tests were standardized.
The results showed a statistically significant difference in favor of psychology students for the ERT test. For the MSCEIT test, students were significantly better in terms of the general EQ and strategic EQ.
They were statistically significantly lower in the experiential aspect of emotional intelligence. On the other hand, in the area of strategic EQ, psychology students were significantly better.
The overall EQ on the BarOn EQ-i self-assessment test was higher to that of the general population as well. Conclusions.
A by-product of the study is the convergent validation performed by a correlation analysis of the ERT, MSCEIT and BarOn EQ-i. Limits.
Measures during the pandemic situation may have affected the development of emotional intelligence in psychology students. The representativeness of the sample is also up for discussion.