Relationship Between Thinking Styles and Emotional Intelligence (EI) of Adolescents

Abstract

Emotional  intelligence  (EI) is  the  ability  to  monitor  one’s  own  and  others’ emotions to actions. Thinking styles is defined as specific reasoning and problem solving strategy that goes some way toward explaining why individuals’ respond differently to problems that need to be solved and both emotional intelligence and thinking styles involves brain activities. Not much research has been done on this area of exploring the relationship between thinking styles and EI among adolescents. Hence the current study was carried out to investigate the same. In this survey research, the relationship of EI as measured by S.K. Mangal and Shubra Mangal’s EI Inventory (MEII) and thinking styles were examined with a sample of college  students (N=120) by multi stage sampling technique in the district of Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India. The mean scores of EI in its four specified domains namely Intrapersonal Awareness, Interpersonal Awareness, Intrapersonal Management and Interpersonal Management was calculated separately. However the total EI score revealed that only 44 percent of the respondents were average and 50 percent with poor EI. The thinking styles of these on its five dimensions namely functions, forms, levels, scope and leanings were also studied. Furthermore, only anarchic style of thinking was found to positively correlate with total EI at 5 per cent significance. Other 11 styles except executive thinking style has a positive correlation value bur not significant. Hence it could be concluded that facilitating change in thinking styles could enhance EI and vice versa. .