Psychological and physical well-being of Lithuanian youth: Relation to emotional intelligence.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this article is to unveil the ways in which the emotional intelligence (EI) of a young person is linked with subjective assessment of physical state, depressiveness, anxiety, and psychological well-being, as well as to determine whether these factors are reliable predictors of EI constituents.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study was conducted using an original EI test (EI-DARL-V1/V2), which consisted of a traditional 73-item questionnaire; tasks of emotional, social and interpersonal situations; and identification of emotions in facial expressions (pictures). Questionnaire items were multiplexed into 5 subscales using multi-step factor analysis. Special questionnaires were devised and presented to participants together with the EI questionnaire in order to assess subjective assessment of physical and mental health, depressiveness, anxiety, and psychological well-being. There were 1430 participants from various regions of Lithuania who participated in the study. The age of participants varied from 17 to 27 years.

RESULTS: Established inverse linear correlation showed that those participants who experienced certain somatic symptoms or unpleasant psychological states had lower EI; a particularly strong correlation was observed between poor subjective assessment of health and understanding and control of one's own emotions. Depressed and anxious participants possessed poorer understanding and ability to regulate emotions of others as well as their own. Also, these participants performed worse when resolving emotional, social, and interpersonal situations. A direct relationship between EI and psychological well-being was established according to three EI indexes i.e. (a) understanding of own emotions; (b) understanding of emotions of other people; (c) control of emotions of others. As perception of psychological well-being increased, participants were able to understand emotions of others better and demonstrated even better ability to understand and control their own emotions. The study failed to determine whether emotion recognition from non-verbal signs (face pictures) was related to at least one of the previously mentioned indexes.

CONCLUSIONS: The study revealed that the factors such as subjective assessment of physical and mental health, depressiveness, anxiety, and psychological well-being were reliable predictors of certain EI indexes.