Does ability-based emotional intelligence contribute to school achievement of elementary school pupils? Ana Babić Čikeš Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek Osijek, Croatia ababic@ffos.hr Vesna Buško Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb Zagreb, Croatia vbusko@ffzg.hr Abstract - The study was designed to test the hypothesis about the contribution of different facets of ability-based emotional intelligence in explaining school achievement in elementary school children controlling for basic demographic features and certain aspects of personality. One hundred and thirty three pupils of 5 th , 6 th , 7 th , and 8 th primary school graders of both gender in Croatia completed three emotional intelligence tests, Empathy self-report questionnaire and Rosenberg self-esteem scale, and reported on their mathematics and foreign language grades as well. Emotional intelligence tests showed significant contribution to school achievement and explained 16.2% of additional criterion variance. The obtained results can be regarded as an evidence of criterion validity for the used EI measures and also as encouragement for further investigation of emotional intelligence in this age group. Keywords-emotional intelligence, early adolescence, school achievement I. INTRODUCTION Emotional intelligence (EI) is one of the most popular constructs in the field of interpersonal differences research in recent twenty years. It refers to emotional information processing and represents a new way of conceptualizing connection between general abilities and emotions [1]. Two theoretical and research lines emerged in research of emotional intelligence. One of them define emotional intelligence as a mixture of different personality traits and abilities [2, 3]. It is characterized by self-report measures and called trait emotional intelligence (e.g. [4, 5]). According to the other perspective, emotional intelligence consists of different mental abilities and can be measured by performance-based measures (ability approach)(e.g. [6, 1]). The most popular ability model is Mayer and Salovey's [7] which represents a theoretical base of this paper. According to that model, emotional intelligence is composed of four classes of abilities, to perceive, use, understand and regulate emotions. Perceiving emotions refers to an ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others as well as in objects, art, stories, music, and other stimuli. Using emotions includes abilities to generate, use and feel emotion as necessary to communicate feelings or employ them in other cognitive processes. Understanding emotion is defined as an ability to understand emotional information, to understand how emotions combine and progress through relationship transitions, and to appreciate such emotional meanings. Finally, managing emotions refers to openness to feelings, including capacity to modulate them in oneself and others so as to promote personal understanding and growth. Popularity of emotional intelligence among scientists and laymen came out of ungrounded claims about it's superiority over general mental ability in predicting life success [2]. Particularly large interest in this topic is found in business and education area, where a lot of research on this subject has been done to date (e.g. [8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]). Albeit research findings did not confirm optimistic expectations on the relevance of emotional intelligence in explaining life criteria, rich empirical literature has been accumulated so far providing evidence on its convergent, discriminant and criterion validity (e. g. [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22]). Despite such an interest, however, there is a lack of empirical data dealing with school-age groups, especially on elementary school pupils. Academic success is one of the most frequently used criteria of adaptive functioning in children and young adults. Correlations between school success and general intelligence in elementary school go around 0.5 [23], and decrease in older age groups when different personality traits become more important [24]. Emotional intelligence is expected to be important in predicting school success since more emotional intelligent students could have number of advantages, like less negative emotions that distract them, better effectiveness in anxiety control, better focusing and better relationships [25, 12]. Empirical data partially confirm the contribution of EI in predicting school success criteria [14, 26, 27, 28, 29] and its’ contribution seems to be larger in secondary school than in student samples [30, 22, 25, 13]. These findings led us to a hypothesis that emotional intelligence might play even more significant role in explaining school achievement in preadolescents. This assumption seems plausible bearing in mind that early adolescence is a period of intensive development accompanied by heightened emotional sensitivity. Nevertheless, research on ability-based conceptions of emotional intelligence in elementary school children is rather sparse. SECTION 6. Psychology, Sociology and Pedagogy, Social Science Advanced Research in Scientific Areas 2012 December, 3. - 7. 2012 INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL CONFERENCE http://www.arsa-conf.com - 720 - A R S A2 0 12 - A d v an c e d R e s e a rc h in S ci en ti fi c A rea s - V IR T U A L C O N F E R E N C E -