Emotional intelligence: A study on university students

Nature bestowed humans with emotions. Emotions are significant predictors of anyone’s success. Now Emotional Intelligence is an established phenomenon is under eye of researcher and psychologist. The objectives of this study were (i) to explore the level of Emotional Intelligence of University’s students. (ii) to find ouu the difference between Emotional Intelligence on the basis of gender, locality, level of course and School of study. This survey based study used data from 200 students of Central University of South Bihar, Gaya, India. Results indicated that all university’s students were having high level of emotional intelligence. Result indicates that all students of School of Education have emotional Intelligence of high level except in comparison of students of School of Law Governance. Male and female students are significantly differed from each other on Emotional Intelligence on overall sample. Female students found more Emotional Intelligent with high mean value. UG and PG students of were found not significantly differ from each other on Emotional intelligence. UG students were more emotionally intelligent on the basis of mean value. Residential location does not have any significant role but rural students were more emotionally intelligent in comparison to their counterpart.


INTRODUCTION
Emotion is an essential element of one's personality and also of life. In both personal and professional survival, emotional intelligence plays a significant role. Emotions are the most influential psychological conditions of human personality. With the help of emotions one can show his or her internal feeling in most effective way. Emotions are the most important aspect of human nature as its motivates one's behaviour. They provide several opportunities to an individual to show his or her internal feeling for the environment.. Emotions with thinking resulting in experience of feelings, Emotions are our strong motivating systems, as they promote and competll us to do something urgent extemporarly and also provide the soultuon of any problem immediately. They play a vital role in social settings by providing help in developing and enhancing interpersonal and intrapersonal communication and relationship [1].
Emotions are involved in every activity, action and reaction of human being. Emotionally intelligent people are able to recognize their potentialities and they exercise this in their personal and professional life. tIn the span of last twewnty year, Emotional Intelligence (EI) concept has become very popular parameter of a person's knowledge, skills and abilities in office, profession, school, personal life and overall success. Now it is being considered widely that emotional intelligenc is also required for the job satisfaction, motivation, decision taking in advers situations etc. It is feeled now that inclusion of emotional intelligence in higher education is needed because it will makes students able to reduce their academic pressure and in After Goleman [2] theory, this notion became stronger and established that emotional intelligence has an important role in the success. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the rapidly evolving concept and also a controversial issue for debate among researcher that EI is a deciding factor of success in a student's life or not. A significant number of researcher and psychologists consider that EI is the concept which is very practical in nature and seems to be very essential for the success in student's life. The present competitive scenario and educational settings focus the success of the student not only on their reasoning capacities as well on the self-awareness, self-contol, emotions, intrapersonal and interpersonal skills.
According Samiari, emotional intelligence is a kind of emotional processing that includes the evaluation of own emotions and also evalutation of other's emotions to cope up more effectively and successfully in society [3].
Bar-On [4] opined that emotional intelligence is an array of non-cognitive and cognitive capabilities, competencies and skills that influence one's own ability to succeed in life whether it is personal or professional. It also helps to cope up with the surrounding environment for living with harmony and satisfaction.
As stated by Cooper and Sawaf in their investigation defined emotional intelligence as the ability to feel, understand, and effectively apply the variety of emotions as a source of human endevours, knowledge, relations and impression on others [5].
Mayer [6] did a study on emotional intelligence, enthusiasm and attitude. He found in his study that in most cases people liked to look for pleasant feelings and they always try to avoid unpleasant feelings. People often try to hide or suppress negative emotions. The ability to control emotions affects people positively and makes their personality even more effective, allowing them to cope with greater stress. Other emotional abilities, such as understanding and understanding emotions, also indirectly contribute to the quality of the emotional experience, helping people to control themselves. The study also concluded that emotional intelligence positively affects attitudes at the workplace.
Michael [7] did a research work on students and teachers to study the emotional intelligence and faculty qualities required for success in a non-traditional classroom setting. The results showed that in terms of students, their emotional intelligence and academic achievements were not meaningful. In terms of teachers, those teachers who were less optimistic tended to have more emotional intelligence while teachers with less emotional intelligence exhibited less optimism. This leads to the conclusion that the amount of emotional intelligence has a direct impact on optimism.
According to Marsh in his study found that emotional intelligence has no direct relation with gender. But it has an impact on the overall evaluation of the students [8]. Farooq [9] conducted a study on the effect of emotional intelligence on educational performance. The results showed that there is a meaningful relationship between emotional intelligence and academic performance. He found that the academic performance of students with high emotional intelligence was also of high order. Students who possessed high emotional intelligence were also particularly high in interpersonal skills, interpersonal skills, adaptation skills, general mood, and stress management skills.
According to Upadhyay [10] found that emotional intelligence is an important factor to generate confidencein students. Students who found low emotional intelligence were also low on the level of self-confidence, whereas students who had high level of self-confidence were also found to have higher emotional intelligence.
The emotional intelligence is related to the educational level of the parents, family income also. It has been found that the emotional intelligence of the children of the households whose parents had higher educational status was also higher. It was also found that income is directly related to children's emotional intelligence level positively [11]. Another study found that teachers' emotional intelligence also has an impact on their gender, age and educational qualifications. All three were associated with emotional intelligence in some way [12].
Annaraja and Jose [13], in their study on B. Ed students, found that students' place of residence has some effect on their emotional intelligence although place of residence has effect on their self-awareness, self-control, social skills. And did not differ significantly on emotional intelligence.
Todd [14] conducted a study to see the relationship between emotional intelligence and student teacher performance. In his study he did not find any significant relation between emotional knowledge and teachers' performance. In general, teachers with more emotional intelligence had more impressive performance.
Samuel [15] explored the relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy for the attitudes of secondary school teachers in South Western Nigeria. The result of the study revealed that there is a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy of secondary school teachers. However, age, gender, and work experience had no effect on this. This study recommended that teachers' emotional intelligence and self-efficacy should be enhanced to improve their work attitudes. Singaravelu [16] studied the emotional intelligence of student teachers (pre-service) at primary level in Urdu medium schools. They found that the emotional intelligence of student teachers in the Pondicherry area was above average. 68% of the overall sample showed an average level of emotional intelligence.
Bibi S [17] in his research study found that there was a positive relationship between the self-esteem and emotional intelligence of the students of Pakistani university. Female students emerged as emotionally more emotionally intelligent than their male counterparts.
This study was designed to achievef following objectives: (i) to study the level of Emotional Intelligence of University's students and (ii) to study the significance difference between Emotional Intelligence on the basis of gender, locality, level of course and school of study.
In accordance to the objectives following hypostheses were framed for the meaningful results: (i) There will be no significance difference in Emotional Intelligence among students on the basis of gender, (ii) There will be no significance difference in Emotional Intelligence among students on the basis of residential locality, (iii) There will be no significance difference in Emotional Intelligence among students on the basis of level of course pursuing, and (iv) there will be no significance difference in Emotional Intelligence among students of School of Education and School of Law & Governance.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2.1 Research method
In the execution of the present study, descriptive survey method of research was employed. This method has been the most popular and the most widely used research method in social sciences.

Population and sample
In this study all students of UG & PG of studying under School of Education and School of Law & Governance of Central University of South Bihar, Gaya constituted population. More than 500 students are studying in both schools. A representative random sample was drawn from both schools by selecting 100 students from both schools. Hence sample was consisting 200 students.

Tools used
Weisinger's Emotional Intelligence Test: The instrument 'Developing Emotional Intelligence' by Weisinger was used to measure the level of emotional intelligence of the respondents. This instrument was speicilly selected for this study because studies had substantiated this instrument using executive data. In the first study, a confirmatory factor analysis-on data gathered from a sample of 466 executives supported the factor structure of Weisinger's five dimensions Emotional Intelligence Model with factor reliabilities from .72 to .80.

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
The main objective of the study is to find out the level of Emotional Intelligence among University's students. This study is planned and carried out to test the assumptions and tentative well defined hypotheses which may be accepted or rejected. Table 1 is showing the Emotional Intelligence of whole sample. Mean values of Emotional Intelligence of male and female students are 107.4 and 107.8 respectively. Obtained t value is -0.098 which is significant at 0.01 level. Hence pre-formulated hypothesis "There will be no significance difference in Emotional Intelligence among students on the basis of gender" stands rejected. It can be infer that there is a significant difference between male and female students on emotional intelligence. High mean score of female students shows that they are more emotionally intelligent, however both groups are highly emotional intelligent. which is not significant. So the hypothesis 2, "There will be no significance difference in Emotional Intelligence among students on the basis of residential locality" stands accepted. Mean value of rural students are high and this value indicating more Emotional Intelligence in comparison to urban students. However both groups are showing high emotional intelligence.  Table 3 is indicating that obtained t value for UG and PG students is non-significant at the level of 0.01. Mean values is higher in case of UG students that is 107.65 in comparison to 107.27. On the basis of obtained t value, hypothesis 3 "There will be no significance difference in Emotional Intelligence among students on the basis of level of course pursuing" stands accepted. Higher mean value of UG students reveals more emotionally intelligent. Statistics of Table 4 is mentioning the t value of Emotional Intelligence scores of the students studying in School of Education and School of Law & Governance. The calculated t value is 2.02 which is non-significant at 0.01 level. On the basis of t value, hypothesis 4, "There will be no significance difference in Emotional Intelligence among students of School of Education and School of Law & Governance" stands accepted. Mean value of students of Education is high in comparison of Law students. It is indicating that Education's students have more emotionally intelligent. Law students are moderate on emotional intelligence scale whether education students are high on the same scale.  Table 5 is presenting an overall view of Emotional Intelligence of the students under School of Education. Male and female students are not significantly differing on Emotional intelligence. On the basis of location again they have not significantly differ on the basis of Emotional intelligence. But in third group, there is a significant difference between UG and PG students. High mean value of UG students indicates the high emotional intelligence. It is clear by Table 6 than different groups of Law students are not significantly differ on Emotional Intelligence except on the basis of gender. There is a significant difference among male and female students on Emotional intelligence, but rural students of law are less addicted than urban students, however this condition was opposite in case of education's students.

CONCLUSION
Results of this study revealed that there is a significant difference in Emotional Intelligence of male and female students on emotional intelligence. Female are more emotionally intelligent on the basis of high mean value. Findings of this research is in consonance of the study of males [18][19][20]. In case of residential location, rural students were not significantly differed from their urban counterpart. But on the basis of high mean value rural students were more emotionally intelligent. In typical Indian rural society peoples still believe in joint family so upbringing of rural student is a collective responsibility of entire family. On other hand in urban localities nuclear family are in trend and line. So children brought up in nuclear family have less chance and opportunities to show or share their emotions. UG students showed more emotional intelligence but this was not significant. Age factor might be behind this. PG students were elder in age so they were more capable in controlling their emotions. Results shows that students of School of Education were more emotionally intelligent in comparison to students of Law & Governance. Students of Law & Governance found moderate on emotional intelligence scale. Teaching is a profession where a teacher has to show different emotions in respect to circumstances. They were trained to tackle the awkward situation of the class with emotions. Law practicing students were expected not to show their emotions because it not healthy for their professional career. In a conclusion the finding of this research indicate that almost students were emotionally intelligent. Slight difference were found there.