Emotional Intelligence and Academic Stress among Undergraduate Students

This paper examines the relationship of Emotional Intelligence and Academic Stress among undergraduate students. 119 undergraduate students between the age group of 18-24 (63 females and 56 males) from different colleges of Kerala were selected randomly to know the relationship between emotional intelligence and academic stress. To evaluate Emotional Intelligence Shutte?s Emotional Intelligence test (SSREIT) was used, to evaluate the academic stress Academic Stress inventory by Lin and Chen (1997) was used. To analyze the obtained data, Spearman rank order correlation and Mann-Whitney U test was employed. The result of present study indicates that there is a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and academic stress. Mann-Whitney U test was computed on gender and the results indicated statistically significant difference in emotional intelligence with respect to gender, in which males obtained higher emotional intelligence compared to females. And there was no statistically significant difference in academic stress with respect to gender. This study provides an insight about emotional intelligence, academic stress and gender differences.