Introduction: Emotional intelligence (EI) is the most researched psychological construct in the 21st century. It predicts success and happiness in life and is suggested as a predictor of mental health (MH). We aimed to assess whether low EI among adolescents acts as a precursor of their MH derangements.
Materials and methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out in Pune Municipal Corporation in 2021 with all due approvals, consent, and assent. EI and MH of adolescents studying in Xth standard in randomly selected 24 out of 440 secondary schools were assessed by Schutte's Emotional Intelligence Test (SET) and Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale 42 (DASS-42) with collection of socio-demographic information. The presence of symptoms of mild to extremely severe depression, anxiety, and stress was considered as MH derangement. All research instruments were translated into the local language, pre-tested, and validated before use. Class teachers were trained for data collection. Data were imported to SPSS version 20 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY) data editor for further analysis. After enlisting frequencies and proportions, associations and correlations were tested by the chi-squared test and Spearman correlation coefficient, respectively.
Results: A total of 622 participants submitted all research instruments. The mean age was 14.74 (+0.742) years. Boys and girls were 38% and 62%, respectively. The majority were Hindus, belonging to socio-economic classes II and III, residing in urban areas. Symptoms of severe to extremely severe depression and anxiety, but not stress, were associated with low EI (p < 0.0001, 0.001, and 0.229). Also, the EI score had a negative correlation with the depression score (ρ = -0.221, p < 0.0001) and anxiety score (ρ = -0.152, p = 0.001), but not with the stress score.
Conclusion: Low EI can be taken as a precursor of MH derangements, especially in the form of depression and anxiety among school-going adolescents.
Recommendations: Efforts to improve EI among adolescents will help to decrease MH derangements, subsequent MH disorders, and suicidality, with improvement in academic performance.
Keywords: adolescents; depression anxiety stress; emotional intelligence; mental health; mental health disorders.
Copyright © 2023, Kulkarni et al.