Emotional intelligence and family environment

The objective of this study was to analyze the relationship between self-reported and perceived emotional intelligence (EI) by the children about themselves and their parents and the family social climate. The theoretical framework is the ability model of Mayer and Salovey (1997) and self-report measures related to it. The sample is composed by 156 children (71 males and 85 females). The scale to assess the EI was the TMMS-24 (Fernandez-Berrocal, Extremera and Ramos, 2004). Also, an adaptation of the TMMS-24 (PTMMS-24) was developed to assess the children’s perception of their parents’ EI in each of the factors: Attention, Clarity and Repair. Perceived family social climate was assessed with the scale FES (Moos, Moos and Trickett, 1995). The correlation analyses show significant associations between the perceived EI of the parents and the perceived family social climate by the children. Block-stratified regression analysis of each subscale of the FES shows how both the perceived and self-reported EI are good predictors for factors such as Expressivity in the family social climate.