Emotional intelligence in nursing students

Introduction: emotion is fundamental to nursing practice and emotionalintelligence is considered as an important characteristic of nurses that can affectthe quality of their work including clinical decision-making, critical thinking,evidence and knowledge use in practice, etc. the aim of this research was to assessand compare emotional intelligence between freshman and senior baccalaureatenursing students at islamic azad university of yazd.methods: this descriptive, cross-sectional study was performed on a sample of87 freshmen and senior baccalaureate nursing students at islamic azad universityof yazd. the data was collected, using a questionnaire. the questionnaireconsisted of two parts; demographic information and the baron emotionalquotient inventory (eq-i). the data were analyzed through both descriptive andinferential statistics (t-test, and anova).results: the mean score of emotional intelligence for the freshmen was282.37±27.93 and for the senior students 289.64±21.13. no significant differencewas found between the freshmen and senior students’ score patterns.conclusion: the findings showed that there was no statistically significantdifference between the freshmen and senior students’ scores. however, asemotional intelligence can have a significant role in what one does. so this qualityshould be given more importance in nursing education.