The Future of Education

Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. Emotional intelligence impacts many different aspects of your daily life, such as the way you behave and the way you interact with others. The study aimed to investigate the relationship between test anxiety and emotional intelligence in university students. For this purpose, 130 female students were randomly selected and answered to Schutte’s Self-reported Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT), and Abolghasemi’s et al Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI). To analyze the data, Pearson correlation and multiple regression analyzes were used. The results showed that there was a negative significant relationship between all of emotional intelligence components (appraisal of emotion, management of emotions, and application of emotion) with test anxiety in students. It means that by increasing the emotional intelligence of students, test anxiety scores decreased. The findings also showed that emotional intelligence was a valid predictor of test anxiety, especially in female university students. Thus, it can be said that emotional intelligence is an important factor in decreasing of students' test anxiety, and experience of emotional intelligence skills can reduce their anxiety.