Gender based empirical study of Emotional Intelligence amongst Students

Emotional Intelligence is a wider term that captures a broad collection of interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. There is an accepted belief that women on an average are more sensitive and aware of their emotions and hence show more empathy. Men, on the contrary are more self-confident, optimistic, and adaptable. Diverse biological and social explanations have been given to explain this difference in emotional intelligence in men and women. This has also received support from a wide range of empirical studies of emotion, which show greater emotional abilities in women. Keeping in mind this difference in emotions as revealed by different researchers, an attempt has been made to study the difference on the basis of gender in the emotional intelligence of undergraduate students of different colleges of Chandigarh. Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Short Form (TEIQue-SF) developed by Petrides and Furnham was used as an instrument to measure the emotional intelligence. A questionnaire was developed to analyze the difference in the emotional level of the male and female students of different colleges of Chandigarh. It covered thirty questions on emotional intelligence through which Total EI score was calculated. 5 subscales of Emotional Intelligence namely – Well-being, Self-control, Emotionality, Sociability and Global Trait EI were also formed from these questions for which separate scores were calculated. Independent t-test was applied to find out the gender differences in emotional intelligence. The results stated that there was no significant difference in the total emotional intelligence scores of male and females.