Emotional Intelligence among Dental Undergraduate Students: An Indispensable and Ignored Aspect in Dentistry

BACKGROUND: Emotional intelligence (EI) is a measure of pure intelligence of cognitive ability that translates psychological knowledge into terms that are useable by people not professionally trained in psychology, like dentists. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional, self-administered, structured questionnaire survey in English was distributed among 186 undergraduate students to assess their EI. It consisted of 30 questions, 5 each to assess the self-awareness, empathy, self-confidence, motivation, social control, and self-competency. All the participants were asked to answer each question, anything between virtually never to virtually always using the rating scale 1-5. RESULTS: The collected data were analyzed using statistical software SPSS version 20 (Chicago, Inc.). The mean, median, and mode for various responses between the groups were compared. Only 11.55% of the participants had good EI with scores above 20 in all domains, while a majority of 54.02% proved to have average EI. A mere 2.05% showed to have very poor EI and 28.84% demonstrated poor EI. CONCLUSIONS: The study showed that only 11.55% had a good EI and a major percentage of the students require immediate intervention to improve their EI.