EPA-0599 – Features of emotional intelligence in burn adolescents

Abstract

The investigation of emotional intelligence seems helpful for understanding of pain experience of adolescents with burns as well as specificity of psychosomatic development of children and adolescents after the deforming impact. The tendency to focus on pain feelings and negative emotions, which are caused by these feelings, may be the reason for atrophy of other aspects of victim's emotional reality, in particular, in understanding of other people's emotions. To study structural features of emotional intelligence in burn adolescents. 12 adolescents with burning injury (n=15) and 17 uninjured adolescents (n=15) underwent testing. They were assessed by the following methods: Lyusin's Emotional intelligence questionnaire, Guilford's social intelligence test, Etkind's color test of attitudes. The study hasn’t revealed any statistically significant differences between indices of general, interpersonal and intrapersonal emotional intelligence of burn adolescents and uninjured ones. But there were discovered statistically significant differences between indices of social intelligence level. Low indices were also revealed for intrapersonal level of emotional intelligence of the adolescents, who got their burn at early age, between 3 to 9 months. At the same time indices of the level of general emotional intelligence in this group are average. Uninjured adolescents think about themselves more positively, while burn adolescents usually more often feel tension when they think of themselves, furthermore they associate themselves with their burn. These were only preliminary results and the study should be continued with not only quantitative but qualitative methods as well.