Emotional Intelligence in boys and girls from 8 to 10 years old in the City of Córdoba

Abstract

The field of study of high intellectual abilities and its connection with emotional intelligence has been gaining resonance in a local level. In Cordoba, Irueste (2012) started studying high intellectual abilities in childhood and in 2018 studied the socioemotional difficulties reported by consultants from the Infant Neuropsicological Service from the psicology department from the National University from Córdoba. A lack of research in this field was the incentive for starting a new research process in 2018 woth the purpose of describing punctuations of the emotional quotient of emotional intelligence in 99 children from ages 8 to 10 from three different schools from Cordoba City.

The study was performed with the Questionnaire of Emotional Intelligence Bar-On EQ-i: YV (1997) with the goal to describe the emotional adjustment level from the study sample. The questionnaire was adapted to spanish by Ferrandiz (2011) and validated by Ferrando (2006) obtaining the internal consistency and compliance of 69 and 83. The research was quantitative, explanatory and transversal and part of "Formar" proyect from Secyt UNC. The analisys of the data was performed with SPSS for Windows version 20.0, analyzing averages, standard deviations, and distributions of frequencies.

From the total 99 cases, the 55,6% belongs to the female gender and the 44,4% to the male gender. What is more, the 43,4% was 8 years old and 56,6% was 9 years old. The average is 112.78, with a typical error +/- 1,229 and a typical deviation of 12,797. Regarding the IE, and the expected values for the age, the 4% obtained low scores, 32,3% obained averages scores and the 61,6% high scores. Only the 2% of the study sample did not finish the test. The boys and girls that where evaluated informed a good emotional adjustment, good capacity for adaptability and intra and interpersonal habilities, as well as adecuate strategies for handling stress, without reporting significant socio-emotional difficulties.

The conclusion of the study is that the emotional intelligence (IE) is an important variable, worth studying for generating a positive impact in the socio-emotional adjustment in the early childhod.