Emotional Intelligence as Predictor of Happiness among Professional and Non-Professional Students

INTRODUCTIONThe economic situation of countries and the global competition in almost all facets of human endeavor call attention of psychologists, social workers, educators and researchers generally, to the need to continuously search for active variables that can enhance human resource development. For this purpose a person should be happy because Happiness is more than anything else, a very private concern that cannot be ascertained from the outside. Someone who, according to specific norms of leading a good life ought to be very happy, does not have to feel happy. For example, a person who has a nice job, earns a reasonably high income, has a good family life, and many friends, can feel very unhappy. Other hidden factors may be influencing this person. Happiness will be defined as the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his or her life-as-a-whole favourably [16]. A widely used assessment tool, the Oxford Happiness Inventory [2] is a measure of global happiness that derives from this conceptualization. Recent research lends support to this idea, showing an orientation to pleasure is not as strong a predictor of life satisfaction as engagement or meaning [12]. In searching for answers to what constitutes happiness and how it develops, many studies have focused on personality trait correlates of happiness [4, 5, 6] with happiness often being described as overlapping with stable extraversion. There were many correlates of happiness which have great impact on happiness of a person like personality traits, material wealth, parental love, married life, emotional intelligence etc. It was predicted that trait emotional intelligence would be the best predictor of happiness because EI is related to emotion regulation, relationship skills, and social competence, necessary ingredients for dealing effectively with other people and deriving pleasure through interpersonal processes. EI has been defined as the ability to adaptively identify, understand, manage, and harness emotions both in the self and others [7, 13, 15] and to use emotions to facilitate cognitive process.JustificationFor many years, the topic of happiness remained neglected, with research concentrating on aspects of human unhappiness, such as depression, anxiety, and emotional disorders. Recently, however, this imbalance has been corrected and there are now many studies of what has come to be called subjective well-being (SWB)-synonym for happiness. Indeed, there is now a whole field called positive psychology dedicated to understanding the process of human happiness. However, some researchers have concluded that personality is a greater determinant of happiness than race, social class, money, social relationships, work, leisure, religion, or other external variables. Indeed, enduring features of the person can have a strong impact, affecting happiness from the inside rather than the outside. Fewer studies have looked at the relationship between happiness and EI. Trait EI is a constellation of emotion-related, self-perceived abilities and dispositions located at the lower levels of personality hierarchies. Therefore, justification of the study is deprived from the limitation of earlier studies which suggests a need for this research.ObjectivesThe objectives of study are to-1. Investigate relationship of emotional intelligence and happiness of students.2. Find out the Difference in emotional intelligence, happiness of professional male and professional female students.3. Find out the difference in emotional intelligence, happiness of non-professional male and non-professional female students.4. Find out the difference in emotional intelligence, happiness of professional male and non-professional male students.5. Find out the difference in emotional intelligence, happiness of professional female and non-professional female students.MethodologySampling: A sample of 400 students will be drawn using Simple Random Sampling from Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra (Haryana). …