Emotional Intelligence in a Sample of Egyptian Depressed Patients

Abstract

Emotional intelligence as a concept was of great interest and under a lot of research work to study its relationship to different psychiatric disorders. Emotional intelligence includes the ability to perceive emotions, use emotions to facilitate thought, understand emotional information, and regulate emotions. Patients with mental disorders have lower overall emotional intelligence. Several studies have shown that emotional abilities are of particular relevance to psychological health and wellbeing. Depression is a mood disorder in whichpatients have problemsin experiencing positive feelings and pleasure. They show low levels of positive affect (mood) and often report depressed patients had lower overall emotional intelligence scores.Specifically, they scored lower on understanding emotions. It seems that the depressed patients are characterized by reduced sensitivity to changing emotional contexts.This matches the fact that their information processing is usually negatively biased or one-sided. Depressed patients also tended to be less skilled than non-clinical controls with respect to using emotions to facilitate thought. This is in accord with the prototypical symptom that depressed people attend specifically to negative emotions. The current study examined the relationship between emotional intelligence and depression was studied in a sample of 45 Egyptian patients of both genders and age range 19-65 years, through Cross sectional case-control comparative study. SCIDΙ was used as diagnostic tool for depression disorders. Hamilton rating scale for depression was used for assessment of severity of depression .TMMS was used for assessment of Emotional intelligence with its subscales (attention, clarity and repair).