THE MEDIATING ROLE OF STRESS PERCEPTION IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH AMONG PSYCHOLOGY AND MEDICAL STUDENTS
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Abstract
The students enrolled at any university having intensive professional courses like medicine, psychology have high risk of mental health problems because of high exposure of psychological distress and academic stress. Emotional intelligence (EI) is one of the psychological resources that has been identified as playing a pivotal role in supporting adaptive coping and regulating emotions. Some evidence is available based on empirical studies and there is still limited evidence regarding the effect of EI on mental health in terms of stress perception among the students of these two groups in Pakistan. For the present study, a total of 300 subjects (students of medical and psychology) of age 19-30 years were selected from different universities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. There were 3 validated instruments which were Brief Emotional Intelligence Scale-10 (BEIS-10), Perceived Stress Scale-10 (PSS-10) and Mental Health Inventory-5 (MHI-5). The results of the correlation analysis indicated that perceived stress had an inverse relationship with mental health measures of both groups, whereas EI showed a positive correlation with mental health measures. In particular, medical students' perceptions of the inverse relationship of EI to perceived stress and psychology students' perceived positive relationship of EI with psychological well-being were deeper. Using PROCESS Macro v4.2 for mediation analysis, the results indicate that EI has a direct effect on mental health, and that perceived stress is partially mediated between EI and mental health. The findings offer implications for understanding the psychological processes underlying the link between emotional competence and well-being and suggested avenues for emotion-focused training programs for universities and interventions that focus on emotions.
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