Abstract:
The present study aimed to find the relationship among scholastic achievement, personality factors and emotional intelligence and to estimate how well traitemotional intelligence predicts college grades over and above personality. Two hundred and sixty-nine undergraduate students (139 humanities and 130 sciences) from Pakistan were administered EQ-i (Bar-On model) and the Big Five. Marks secured in the Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) and the First Year College degree program GPA was obtained from the college record. The results showed that self report emotional intelligence and the Big Five personality dimensions overlapped significantly. Previous HSSC marks appeared as a major predictor of college GPA followed by trait-emotional intelligence scores, more for the humanities than for sciences. The five personality dimensions did not significantly predict GPA, however, when personality dimensions were statistically controlled the trait-emotional intelligence lost predictive significance in relation to GPA. Thus only high school scholastic achievement, i.e., HSSC predicted college GPA not the affective variables, i.e., personality traits or emotional intelligence which shared covariance between themselves significantly. It appears from the results that trait-emotional intelligence is not a distinct construct from that of personality traits.
Page(s):
54-65
DOI:
DOI not available
Published:
Journal: Pakistan Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Volume: 8, Issue: 1, Year: 2010
Keywords:
Emotional Intelligence
,
the Big Five
,
incremental validity
,
college grades