Abstract:

A concept that is becoming increasingly relevant in our society is emotional intelligence, since it is presented as a set of competencies that help us to achieve greater academic and professional success. In this line, it is also important the role played by resilience, understood as the ability we have to adapt to the diversity of situations we face in our daily lives.

In order to delve deeper into these concepts and subsequently analyze the importance of including them in higher education training, the main objective of this study was to determine the relationship between resilience and emotional intelligence scores in a sample of university students.

The sample consisted of students of the Undergraduate Degree in Early Childhood Education (12.1%) and Primary Education (87.9%) of the University of Alicante (Spain); that is, a total of 173 students. The average age is 20 years. In addition, only 24.9% of the participants were men.

Regarding the procedure, first of all, the entire sample received the necessary information about the study and gave their informed consent. In addition, the research was evaluated by the UA Ethics Committee. Later, the participants answered the questions that collected information about demographic data, as well as the questionnaires of the instruments.

Two instruments were used for data collection: the 24-item Trait Meta-mood Scale and the 25-item Connor and Davidson Resilience Scale.

In relation to the analyses, on the one hand, Pearson's correlation coefficient was performed to determine the relationships between resilience and emotional intelligence and, on the other hand, multiple regression analysis was carried out following the step-by-step method, with the resilience factor score as the criterion variable.

The results of the study indicated that resilience correlates with two of the measured factors of emotional intelligence: emotional clarity and emotional regulation. In contrast, it does not correlate with emotional attention. Likewise, clarity and regulation act as predictors of student resilience. The analyses revealed that, independently, the greater the emotional regulation and emotional clarity, the higher the level of resilience.

In conclusion, this work has allowed us to know that the higher the levels of emotional intelligence, the better the resilience capacity of university students. It is therefore interesting to work on a variety of strategies related to emotional education for students to improve their way of dealing with the different situations they face daily as university students, as well as those they will face later on in their working lives.

Keywords:

Resilience, emotional intelligence, university students, education, teachers.