RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH OF COLLEGE STUDENTS

Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica 2020, Vol. XXIX, N°2, 1045-1052

DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.345 1045

R

ELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

E

MOTIONAL

I

NTELLIGENCE AND

M

ENTAL

H

EALTH OF

C

OLLEGE

S

TUDENTS

Yuanyin Wang

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health of college students. Through a questionnaire survey on college students, a total of 600 valid questionnaires were collected. Based on the survey results, the emotional intelligence and mental health of the respondents were measured by two scales, namely, the Emotional Intelligence Scale for College Students developed by Xu and Zhang, and the

Mental health scale for college students with healthy personality orientation, which is inspired by Huang’s

theory of sound personality. The results show that the emotional intelligence of college students is affected by factors like grade, major, gender, academic qualification and place of origin; the mental health of college students is influenced by grade, major and gender, but not impacted by academic qualifications or place of origin; the emotional intelligence of a college student partly reflects the mental health, while the latter also demonstrates the emotional intelligence to a certain extent. The research results provide a scientific basis for mental health counselling and education of college students.

Key words: College Students, Emotional Intelligence, Mental Health, Impact Relations. Received: 13-03-19 | Accepted: 18-09-19

INTRODUCTION

Researches have been focusing on the impact of emotional intelligence on individual academic and occupational success in the career and life, and highlighting the regulation and promotion of emotional intelligence for cognitive activities. In recent years, emotional intelligence has been applied to the study of individual social adaptation, life satisfaction and subjective well-being, which opens the way for the introduction of emotional intelligence into individual psychological adjustment and social adaptation. Emotional intelligence links cognitive and emotional processes, and facilitates the interaction, infiltration and promotion between the two (Abdollahi, Yaacob, Talib et al., 2015; Kim, Sung, Park et al., 2015). It is reasonable to hold that emotional intelligence is an important

School of Economics and Management, Ankang University, Ankang 72500, China.

E-Mail: [email protected]

psychological resource and an ability to promote individual mental health. The research on the characteristics of emotional intelligence and mental health of college students can help us to correctly understand the structure of emotional intelligence and its relationship with mental health, provide theoretical guidance for mental health education of college students, and more importantly, help us strengthen the cultivation of emotional intelligence of college students from another angle (Lawal, Idemudia, & Senyatsi, 2018; Li, Cao, Cao et al., 2015; Rohilla & Tak, 2016). In daily teaching, we can properly add skills training for emotional intelligence to help college students improve their abilities of mental health care. At the same time, we integrate physical education, sports competitions, physical exercise and emotional intelligence and mental health in a comprehensive manner to understand whether emotional intelligence can regulate the negative impact of life events on mental health (Howe, Falkenbach, & Massey, 2014). This will enlighten mental health workers about how to alleviate the

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negative impact of various kinds of stress on college students' mental health, to further help them overcome psychological crisis and prevent potential problems. This paper, in order to understand the relationship between emotional intelligence and college students' mental health, conducts a comprehensive survey and research on the students from six universities in China, and draws corresponding conclusions based on the field survey, so as to provide a theoretical basis for the implementation and development of mental health education for college students, and a scientific foundation for their mental health counselling and education.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Literature review on emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an irrational emotional ability, a kind of self-cultivation and social intelligence, a spiritual power, and another form of human intelligence. It expresses a person's ability to recognize, control and regulate his own and other people's emotions, and reflects a person's emotional quality and the accurate and effective level of emotional information processing. It also reveals a person's potential of a virtuous mental cycle caused, stimulated and promoted by emotions. The main components of emotional intelligence are shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

.

Components of emotional

intelligence

Psychologists continue deepening the structural study of emotional intelligence, but also try to

develop quantitative tools that can accurately measure emotional intelligence. Although the

development of emotional intelligence

measurement tools is lagged behind that of emotional intelligence structure, the emergence of these scales not only provides a quantitative standard for the measurement of individual emotional intelligence, but also has continuously expanded the breakdown researches on emotional intelligence in the past decade. According to the literature at home and abroad, the emotional intelligence scales currently used in relevant research mainly include Bar-On scale (EQ-i), Schutte Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (SEI), Multivariate Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS), Mayer and Salovey, Caruso Emotional Intelligence Scale (MSCEIT), etc (Aradilla-Herrero, Tomás-Sábado, & Gómez-Benito, 2014; Ashraf, & Khan, 2014).

From the above discussion, it can be seen that the theory of emotional intelligence is not mature enough in concept definition, theoretical structure and evaluation measurement. So far, no authoritative scientific measurement tools have been developed with no models recognized, resulting in no strong theoretical support for the significance of emotional intelligence. Therefore, there is an urgent need for in-depth theoretical and empirical research in this field.

Literature review on the mental health of college students

The university stage is a key period of life due to physiological and psychological characteristics, and an excellent period for knowledge and long-term ability acquisition and comprehensive quality improvement. It is also a special period for college students who may easily encounter psychological problems and conflicts but lack corresponding solving ability. Nowadays, the mental health is an important part of college students' education, as it is the very first phase to cultivate these students as healthy individuals both physically and mentally. In recent years, the college students have suffered heavier psychological burden brought by increasingly fierce social competition, resulting in higher incidence of psychological problems year by year. Previous studies have demonstrated unoptimistic status quo of college students' mental health reflected by gradually increasing proportion of students with various psychological disorders and problems is in China's colleges and universities (Lolaty, Tirgari, & Fard, 2014; Sims, 2017). This request huge attention paid to college students' mental health and actions to further strengthen the

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH OF COLLEGE STUDENTS ₁₀₄₇

mental health education.

Previous studies on mental health focus mostly on mental illness and psychological disorders in a narrow sense while little on the development of potential problems. Referring to the literature, it is found that most recent studies on mental health still use SCL-90 or the Depression and Anxiety Scale (Guo, Ji, You et al., 2017). Such scales assume by default that mental health is the opposite of mental illness. However, the common psychological problems of contemporary college students in counselling are mainly in the interpersonal relationship, love, learning and neurosis, most of which are developmentally related. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the status quo of college students' mental health by using the Positive Psychological Orientation Scale.

Literature review on the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health

Previous studies have generally revealed that emotional intelligence and mental health are very important for personal success, but there are many disputes about the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health. Does the higher emotional intelligence bring the healthier psychology, or vice versa? There has been controversy and discussion in the academic circles on this issue. Domestic research, in general, is still at a relatively shallow level, with more repetition and imitation and even a lot of fallacies but less innovation (Darban, Karamzehi, Balouchi et al., 2016; Schroder, Dawood, Yalch et al., 2015). Especially for the so-called "emotional quotient" in various books constantly published, not only scientific and theoretical basis but also the real effect in practice require further improvement and verification.

Existing researches on the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health in China and beyond have revealed many outstanding issues. Firstly, we can see from the above several theories of emotional intelligence that many scholars disagree on the concept and basic structure of emotional intelligence. So far, there is no final conclusion on the unified definition of the connotation of emotional intelligence (enshaw, Eklund, Bolognino et al., 2016), for which the theoretical basis is absent for the exploration of the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health. Secondly, the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health is still unclear at this stage. Despite some relevant researches, their conclusions still need to be verified, and the research methods are not strict and

comprehensive enough, which led to the disagreement of the research results. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct in-depth discussion in this paper. As mentioned above, the emotional intelligence does not possess a clear and unified theoretical basis as a new topic proposed in the last decade, so the research on emotional intelligence should be improved in an all-round way by more scholars. This study explores the relationship between mental health and emotional intelligence from the perspective of positive psychology orientation, in the purpose of attracting more attention of psychological researchers to bring more profound studies.

RESEARCH OBJECT AND METHOD

Research route

In this paper, the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health of college students is analysed. The research route adopted is shown in Figure 2 below.

Objects of study

The emotional intelligence and mental health of sports majors from six universities were investigated and studied in terms of their origin, nature, grade, gender and professional orientation. The sample size of the survey was 650, with 50 incomplete data eliminated and 600 valid questionnaires obtained, and the effective recovery rate was 91%. Among them, 360 were male (60.0%) and 240 were female (40.0%). In the investigation, the author has grasped the first-hand survey data, and put forward corresponding countermeasures according to the problems in emotional intelligence and mental health of college students majoring in physical education. Sample characteristics are detailed in Table 1.

Research methods

(1) College students’ emotional intelligence scale.

This study adopted the Emotional Intelligence Scale for College Students developed by Xu Xiaoyan and Zhang Jinfu. On the basis of large sample and factor analysis, the scale can be divided into five main dimensions: emotional perception, emotional adaptability, emotional regulation, emotional expression and emotional evaluation. Further, the five have 18 sub-dimensions: emotional awareness, empathy, social responsibility; problem solving, persistence, self-motivation, reality testing; control, flexibility, independence, stress tolerance, interpersonal relationship; appeal, expression;

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Figure 2.

Flow chart of research route

Table 1.

Characteristic of subject sample

Variable Number Percentage

Gender Male 360 60%

Female 240 40%

Grade

Freshman 180 30%

Sophomore 192 32%

Junior 113 18.80%

Senior 115 19.20%

Professional direction

Arts 192 32%

Science 198 33%

Engineering 210 35%

Birthplace City 386 64%

Countryside 214 36%

The nature of colleges Junior colleges 324 54%

Colleges and universities 276 46%

achievement motivation, self-respect, optimism, happiness. (2) Mental health scale for college students with healthy personality orientation. The Linkert 5-point scale of 27 items based on Professor Huang Xiting's theory of sound personality was used in this study, and the report is reliable and valid in line with the requirements of. Mental health status of students with normal mental function and healthy personality was measured in six dimensions: happy experience, interpersonal harmony, active learning, emotional regulation, goal pursuit and courage to challenge.

This study adopted SPSSl6.0 statistical software to process the data collected through the questionnaire survey and statistically analysed by

variance analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis, etc.

RESEARCH RESULTS

Differences in emotional intelligence and related variables among college students

The results suggest that the junior college students in Guangdong have significant differences in the main dimensions of emotional intelligence and emotional resilience at the grade level (see Table 2). In terms of emotional perception, F (1,818) = 5.578 and P = 0.001<0.01; in terms of emotional adaptability, F (1,818) = 3.943 and P=0.008<0.01. Liberal arts and science majors show significant

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH OF COLLEGE STUDENTS ₁₀₄₉

Table 2.

One-way ANOVA of emotional intelligence, perception and adaptability of college

students in different grades

Freshman Sophomore Junior Senior F value Significance level

Emotional Intelligence 325.41±47.13 328.82±50.88 333.88±61.92 321.62±37.92 1.587 0.195 Emotional perception 39.94±7.22 40.69±7.34 42.93±10.86 39.58±5.93 5.589 0.002 Emotional adaptability 75.01±11.64 76.81±12.98 78.95±15.98 74.41±9.89 3.954 0.009

Table 3.

One-way ANOVA of emotional intelligence and emotional regulation ability of college

students of different majors

Liberal arts Science F value Significance level

Emotional intelligence 328.67±49.76 326.01±49.92 1.198 0.296 Emotional regulation 93.32±15.89 90.29±15.45 7.735 0.006

Table 4.

One-way ANOVA of emotional intelligence and emotional expression of college students

from different origins

Countryside Town City F value Significance level

Emotional intelligence 331.39±47.62 322.94±48.62 326.92±53.62 1.885 0.139 Emotional expression 44.35±6.95 42.83±6.93 42.66±7.64 2.878 0.047

Figure 3.

One-way ANOVA of emotional

intelligence and emotional expressiveness

of college students

Freshman Sophomore Junior Senior Liberal arts Science Countryside Town City 316

318 320 322 324 326 328 330 332 334

Single factor

differences in the dimension of emotional regulation (see table 3). The scores of emotional regulation ability of liberal arts students are significantly higher than those of science students, with F (1,818) = 7.724 and P = 0.006<0.01. Concerning the main dimension of emotional expression, students from different places of origin present significant differences, with F (1,818) = 2.867 and P = 0.036<0.05(see Table 4). The one-way analysis of variance of college students' emotional intelligence in different dimensions is shown in Figure 3.

The difference in mental health status and related variables among college students

There are no significant differences in happiness experience, interpersonal harmony, positive learning, emotional regulation and challenge-taking

among the students. In terms of the college’s nature,

undergraduates and junior college students display significant difference in the factor of goal pursuit at 0.05 level, with F (1,818) = 4.668 and P = 0.031 <

0.05 Regarding the gender, male and female students show significant differences in active learning at 0.01 level, with F (1,818) = 6.846 and P = 0.009 < 0.01, and in the goal pursuit at 0.05 level, with F (1,818) = 4.201 and P = 0.041 > 0.05.Moreover, male students obtain significantly higher scores than female ones. Referring to grades, freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior students show substantial differences in the positive learning performance at the level of 0.05, with F (1,818) = 6.026 and P = 0.000 < 0.01. Specifically verified by the LSD multiple comparison method, the results demonstrate a significant difference between juniors and freshman at the level of 0.05. With regard to the professional direction, significant differences are found between students in liberal arts and science in the happiness experience and active learning at 0.05 level. In happiness experience, F (1,818) = 4.801 and P = 0.029 < 0.05; in active learning, F (1,818) = 5.412 and P = 0.020 < 0.05. It shows that liberal arts students feel happier and more fun of leaning than science students.

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The correlation analysis of college students' emotional intelligence and mental health

Emotional intelligence and its five main dimensions are significantly correlated with mental health and its six factors (p < 0.001). Among them, the following factors show higher correlation coefficient. The correlation coefficient of emotional intelligence and mental health is 0.811. Specifically, the coefficients of the correlation between mental health and emotional adaptability, emotional regulation and emotional evaluation are 0.753, 0.745 and 0.770, respectively. The coefficients of the correlation between emotional intelligence and emotional regulation and interpersonal harmony are 0.732 and 0.709, respectively. For some other factors, despite a significant correlation at the level of 0.001, the correlation degree is slightly weak. The correlation coefficient between emotional expression and active learning is 0.250; the correlation coefficient between emotional expression and emotional regulation is 0.200; the correlation coefficient between emotional perception and emotional regulation is 0.304. Additionally, the correlation coefficients between the factor of daring to challenge and emotional intelligence and its five dimensions are below 0.50, with a low correlation degree, as shown in Table 5 and Figure 4.

Figure 4.

The correlation analysis of

emotional intelligence and mental health

Mental health_Happiness experience_Interpersonal harmony_Enthusiastic learning Emotional regula

tion

Pursuit of goals Challenges

0.20 0.25 0.30 0.35 0.40 0.45 0.50 0.55 0.60 0.65 0.70 0.75 0.80 0.85

Pro

je

ct

Project

Emotional intelligence Emotional perception Emotional adaptability Emotional regulation Emotional expressiveness Emotional assessment

Regression analysis of college students' emotional intelligence and related variables

The six variables of interpersonal harmony, happy experience, goal pursuit, courage to challenge, emotional regulation and active learning are applied to the regression equation of emotional intelligence successively, and all show great significance, indicating a high predictive effect on emotional intelligence (P<0.001), as shown in Table 6 and Figure 5.

Table 5.

Analysis of the correlation between emotional intelligence and mental health

Project Emotional

intelligence

Emotional perception

Emotional adaptability

Emotional regulation

Emotional expressiveness

Emotional assessment

Mental health 0.822 0.574 0.764 0.756 0.483 0.781

Happy

experience 0.661 0.485 0.591 0.554 0.468 0.678

Interpersonal

harmony 0.743 0.593 0.596 0.712 0.492 0.688

Active learning 0.562 0.367 0.632 0.497 0.261 0.535

Emotional

regulation 0.529 0.315 0.491 0.596 0.212 0.463

Pursuit of goals 0.593 0.366 0.562 0.523 0.424 0.592

Courage to

Challenge 0.463 0.393 0.419 0.389 0.368 0.397

Table 6.

Stepwise regression analysis of college students' emotional intelligence and related

variables

Explanatory variables

Non-standardized regression coefficient

Standard error

Standardized regression coefficient

T value

P value

Constant term 127.268 6.399 --- 20.234 0

Interpersonal

harmony 5.216 0.327 0.418 16.462 0

Happy experience 2.368 0.347 0.198 7.018 0

Pursuit of goals 2.283 0.397 0.162 5.898 0

Courage to challenge 4.154 0.576 0.167 7.331 0

Emotional regulation 1.898 0.362 0.136 5.267 0

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH OF COLLEGE STUDENTS ₁₀₅₁

Table 7.

Stepwise regression analysis of college students' mental health and related variables

Explanatory variables Non-standardized

regression coefficient Standard error Standardized regression coefficient T value P value

Constant term -6.378 2.249 --- -2.858 0.004

Emotional Assessment 0.367 0.052 0.348 8.759 0

Emotional adaptability 0.428 0.052 0.361 10.189 0

Emotional regulation 0.257 0.045 0.263 7.186 0

Emotional perception -0.193 0.068 -0.102 -3.389 0.002

Emotional expression 0.135 0.063 0.069 2.396 0.028

Figure 5.

Regression analysis of college

students' emotional intelligence and related

variables

Constant term Interpersonal re

lationship Happiness expe

rience _Pursuit of goals Dare to challeng

e Emotional regula

tion Enthusiastic lear

ning

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140

Ex

pl

an

at

ory

v

ari

ab

le

s

Project

Non-standardized regression coefficient Standard error

Standardized regression coefficient T value

Figure 6.

Regression analysis of college

students' mental health and related

variables

Constant term Emotional Assessment Emotional adaptability Emotional regulation Emotional perceptionEmotional expressiveness -7

-6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Ex

pl

an

at

ory

v

ari

ab

le

s

Project

Non-standardized regression coefficient Standard error

Standardized regression coefficient T value

Regression analysis of college students' mental health and related variables

The five variables of emotional evaluation, emotional adaptability, emotional regulation, emotional perception and emotional expression are applied to the regression equation of emotional intelligence successively, and all display huge

significance, revealing a high predictive effect on emotional intelligence (P<0.001), as shown in Table 7 and Figure 6.

CONCLUSION

The results of this survey show that there are demographic differences in the level of emotional intelligence of college students that is influenced by their grades, majors, educational backgrounds, gender, etc. To a certain extent, the mental health of college students is affected by their grades, professional categories, gender, etc., but barely by academic qualifications or places of origin. The This paper concluded a significant positive linear correlation between college students' emotional intelligence and their mental health with the coefficient of 0.811, and basically verifies previous views on this topic. Specifically, the level of emotional intelligence can explain the individual's mental health, while the individual's mental health can also reflect the level of emotional intelligence to a certain extent. This paper enlightens us that emotional intelligence is important for mental health and should be included into the existing mental health education for college students.

Acknowledgements

Special research project of Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education; Project name: Ideological and political education value and application research of Ankang regional culture (project number: 18JK0001).

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