Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Background & Objective: Emotional intelligence refers to the ability of controlling one’s own emotional tendencies and understanding feelings of other individuals which results in the occurrence of calm and calculated behaviors in relation with others and continence. In fact, it is via emotional intelligence that an individual is able to keep his/her positive mood and enhance it. This ability generates a lot of positive consequences for the individuals. Thus, its investigation and evaluation in students with special needs (e.g. visually impaired, hard-of-hearing and gifted high school students) as well as their peers in normal education schools is very significant. Because of suffering from limitations and deprival, those students with special needs are deprived of a lot of experiences which can have a lot of influences on their emotional transformation and elaboration; the present study is to compare components of emotional intelligence in high school students with visual impairment, hearing impairment, as well as gifted and peers in normal education schools.
Methods: The present study is a causal-comparative research. The population consisted of all male and female high school students with visual impairment, hearing impairment, and gifted and normal ones. The sample size included 120 students selected via the convenience sampling technique. As a result, 30 students with visual impairment, 30 ones with hearing impairment, 30 gifted ones, and 30 normal ones were selected. The sample groups were homogenized in terms of age, gender, and academic grades. The Bar-On EQ I® was selected for collecting data both individually and in schools. To analyze data at the descriptive level, mean and standard deviation, and at the inferential level, MANOVA and Fisher's Least Significant Difference (LSD) follow-up test were employed.
Results: There is significant differences among the four groups of participants in terms of variables of problem solving (p˂0.001), happiness (p˂0.001), independence (p˂0.001), self-actualization (p=0.003), emotional self-awareness (p=0.004), realism (p=0.044), optimism (p=0.003), flexibility (p=0.003), accountability (p˂0.001), and sympathy (p=0.030). Moreover, no significant difference was observed among the groups in terms of variables of stress tolerance (p=0.362), interpersonal relationships (p=0.105), self-esteem (p=0.548), impulse control (p=0.156), and self-instrument (p=0.073).
Conclusion: Findings indicated that those four groups of students were significantly different in terms of components of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence bestows this skill to individuals to manage their life pressures whose main part is the emotional aspect and solve their problems optimally. Students with special needs (high school students with visual and hearing impairments) are lacking in this skill. As a result, this issue imposes limitations on their lives and cusses them to experience a number of problems. According to the results of the present study, and since emotional intelligence should be a skill for explaining psychological problems of those groups and play an effective role in handling their social-emotional problems, by preparing educational programs for enhancing their emotional intelligence and consequently reducing their emotional-psychological-social problems, the grounds can be provided for growing their emotional intelligence and reducing their family and social problems.