Emotional competencies and cognitive antecedents in shaping student’ s entrepreneurial intention: the moderating role of entrepreneurship education Virginia Fernández-Pérez 1 & Ana Montes-Merino 2 & Lázaro Rodríguez-Ariza 3 & Patricia Esther Alonso Galicia 4 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract This paper focuses on the analytic thinking of emotional competencies and their influence, in particular, in shaping university students’ entrepreneurial intentions, backed by an extended model of Ajzen’ s Theory of Planned Behaviour, and analyses the moderating role of entrepreneurial education among the variables under study. The results, derived from an ex-ante and ex-post questionnaire addressed to Spanish university students engaged in a compulsory entrepreneurship course, were subjected to structural equation modelling analysis. Our findings show that entrepreneurship by university students is favoured by the development of their emotional competencies, due to the direct influence of the latter in shaping entrepreneurial intention and its positive impact on their cognitive antecedents (entrepreneurial attitudes and perceived Int Entrep Manag J DOI 10.1007/s11365-017-0438-7 * Virginia Fernández-Pérez vfperez@ugr.es Ana Montes-Merino ammontes@ujaen.es Lázaro Rodríguez-Ariza lazaro@ugr.es Patricia Esther Alonso Galicia pealonsog@itesm.mx 1 Departamento de Organización de Empresas, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad de Granada, Campus Universitario de Cartuja, s/n, C.P, 18071 Granada, Spain 2 Departamento de Economía Financiera y Contabilidad, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas, Universidad de Jaén, Campus BLas Lagunillas^, Edificio D3, C.P, 23071 Jaén, Spain 3 Departamento de Economía Financiera y Contabilidad, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad de Granada, Campus Universitario de Cartuja, s/n, C.P, 18071 Granada, Spain 4 Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Departamento Académico de Administración y Emprendimiento, Campus Querétaro, Querétaro, Mexico