Original scientific paper
Emotional intelligence abilities as predictors of prosocial and aggressive behaviour of early adolescent students
Nikolina Grgić
; Zavod za javno zdravstvo Osječko-baranjske županije, Osijek, Hrvatska
Ana Babić Čikeš
; Sveučilište Josipa Jurja Strossmayera u Osijeku, Filozofski fakultet Osijek, Hrvatska
Silvija Ručević
; Sveučilište Josipa Jurja Strossmayera u Osijeku, Filozofski fakultet Osijek, Hrvatska
Abstract
In the last twenty years a large number of empirical evidence on the importance of emotional intelligence in the prediction of various aspects of social functioning was collected. However, despite the interest of professionals who deal with children and adolescents in this construct, the majority of studies were conducted on students and adults samples. This particularly applies for the study of emotional intelligence in the context of the ability model, one of the two dominant approaches in the study of emotional intelligence. In this research we wanted to examine relationship between different emotional intelligence abilities, operationalized according to the model of Mayer and Salovey (1997) and measured with performance tests, with the variables of aggression and prosocial behavior among early adolescent students. We hypothesized that the measures of emotional intelligence would have a significant contribution to the explanation of aggressive and prosocial behavior. The study included 378 students in the higher grades of elementary school with a mean age of 13.38 years. Emotional intelligence abilities were estimated with three tests: Perception of affective content in art test (TOESS), Emotion analysis test (TAE) and Emotion management test (TUE). Participants also completed adapted version of PROS/AG scale. Emotion management test proved to be statistically significant negative predictor of aggressive behavior in boys and statistically significant positive predictor of prosocial behaviour in boys and girls. The other two tests of emotional intelligence are not proved to be significant predictors of aggressive and prosocial behavior of participants. These results partially confirm the role of emotional intelligence in the prediction of aggressive and prosocial behavior, and some shortfalls of this study suggest that this role could be even more significant.
Keywords
emotionalintelligence; aggressiveandprosocialbehaviour; adolescents
Hrčak ID:
131206
URI
Publication date:
10.12.2014.
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