Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 33 (2012) 478 482

1877-0428 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of PSIWORLD2011
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.01.167
Procedia
Social and
Behavioral
Sciences
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000000
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PSIWORLD 2011
Adolescents emotional intelligence and parental styles
Laura-Elena Nstas
a*
, Kincso Sala
b
a
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Transilvania University of Brasov , 29 Eroilor Blvd. 500036, Brasov, Romania
b
Disabled child's rehabilitation center, 62 Puskas Tivadar Street 520081, Sfantu Gheorghe, Romania
Abstract
Parents try to adopt a parental style adapted to their own sons and daughters needs, some of them consider opportune
educating adolescents like they were once educated, and others wish to act differently from their parents education.
The present study proposes to highlight the relationship between the level of development of emotional intelligence
and parental styles. There were implied 90 adolescents and their parents. The adolescents completed 2 individual tests
which evaluate the developmental level of emotional intelligence and its components: Emotional Intelligence Scale
EIS (Schutte et al., 1998) and Battery of Emotional Intelligence Profile BTPIE (Wood, Tolley, 2003). The parents
were asked to fill in the Questionnaire for the parental styles CSP. The results show the fact that the development
level of emotional intelligence is influenced by the five parental styles: authoritarian, dictatorial, permissive,
democratic and rejecting / neglecting. The manner in which parents raport to their own adolescents, marks the level
of development of emotional intelligence.
2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of PSIWORLD 2011
Keywords: emotional intelligence, parental styles, authoritarian, dictatorial, permissive, democratic and rejecting / neglecting;
1. Introduction
With the introduction of the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) and its theoretical development,
interest has focused on the relationship between IE and various aspects of psychic life and its implications
in everyday life. Its supporters argue that emotional skills are important in almost all areas of a person's
life - from career success to being liked by the others. In the specialty literature there are numerous
researches aiming at the relationship between emotional intelligence and various aspects of mental life,
such as academic performance, deviant, abusive and self-destructive behaviour, Life Space, life
satisfaction, the quality of interpersonal relationships, teaching and professional career, leadership and
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +4-0740-090-936.
E-mail address: lauranastase@unitbv.ro; en_kincsi@yahoo.com.
2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of PSIWORLD2011
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organizational behaviour (Gottman, Silver, 1999; Brown, George-Curran, Smith, 2003; Mayer, Salovey,
Caruso, 2004, Petrides, Frederickson, Furnham, 2004; Brackett, Mayer, Warner, 2004; Salovey, Grew,
2005, Trinidad, Unger, Chou, Johnson, 2005; Landa, Lopez-Zafra, Antoana Martinez, Pulido, 2006;
Hosu, Nstas, 2008; Pantaziu, Nstas, 2008; Nastas, Dihoru, 2009).
In Adina Baran-Pescarus view (2004), parenting style is the manner in which parents express their
beliefs about what it means to be a good parent or a bad parent. The author has identified five parenting
styles: authoritarian, permissive, democratic or balanced, rejecting-neglecting and dictatorial. Parents tend
to adopt a style and easily and quickly move to another one (when they are angry and frustrated they
become authoritarian, they become permissive when tired and try to compensate through democratic
approaches), which negatively affects the psychological development of children and adolescents.
2. Method
2.1. Hypotheses
The parentalm style influences the development of emotional intelligence in teenagers. Starting from
this general hypothesis we formulated the following specific hypotheses:
Authoritarian parental style is associated with a low level of emotional intelligence.
Dictatorial parental style is associated with a low level of emotional intelligence.
Democratic parental style correlates positively with high levels of emotional intelligence.
Permissive parental style correlates positively with high levels of emotional intelligence.
Rejecting / neglecting parental style correlates with low emotional intelligence.
2.2. Participants
There were involved 90 teenagers in the eleventh and twelfth grade (60 girls and 30 boys) and their
parents. For piloting the Questionnaire for finding out the parental style - CSP, 46 parents who have one
or two teenagers were asked to fill it in. To respect the rules of professional conduct, the written consent
of each student participant has been demanded. The results are confidential and used only in the present
study.
2.3. Measures
Adolescents were individually assessed with two psychological tests that measure the level of
development of emotional intelligence and its components: Emotional Intelligence Scale EIS (Schutte,
Malouff, Hall, Haggerty, Cooper, Golden, Dornheim, 1998) and Battery of Emotional Intelligence Profile
BTPIE (Wood, Tolley, 2003).
Parents were asked to complete the Questionnaire for finding out the parental style CSP. This was
designed in this research based on the model proposed by Baran-Pescaru (2004). CSP includes five
dimensions, each one covering a parental style (authoritarian, permissive, democratic, dictatorial,
rejecting / neglecting). Initially the questionnaire was composed of 35 items, with seven items
characteristic for each parental style and has been validated on a sample of 46 parents. The results
obtained have led to the designing of the Questionnaire for finding out parental style CSP, which
comprises 30 items (6 items each for each of the five parenting styles). The answer to each item is given
based on a Likert scale, where 1 means strong disagreement, 2 means disagreement, 3 is partial
agreement, 4 is agreement and 5 represents total agreement. Regarding the internal consistency of CSP
high values of Alfa Cronbach coefficients were obtained for all five dimensions: = .769 for the
480 Laura-Elena Nstas and Kincso Sala / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 33 (2012) 478 482
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authoritarian style, = .764 for the permissive style, = .808 for the democratic style, = .711 for
neglecting/rejecting style, and = .779 for the dictatorial style.
3. Results
To complete psychometric data on the qualities of the instrument aimed at assessing the emotional
intelligence with the Emotional Intelligence Scale EIS (Schutte et al., 1998) and the Questionnaire for
finding out the parental style CSP, the Cronbach indices for internal consistency were calculated for
each sample, on the research group included in the research (90 adolescents and their parents).
Table 1. Cronbachs coefficient values for EIS and each dimension of the CSP
Dimensiunea Crombach
IE EIS (Schutte et al., 1998) .94
Authoritarian parental style SAR-CSP .82
Permissive parental style SPR-CSP .90
Democratic parental style SDO-CSP .84
Neglecting/rejecting parental style SRN-CSP .90
Dictatorial parental style SAT-CSP .90
The Emotional Intelligence Scale -EIS is homogenous, having an = .94 (Tabel 1). Note that the
internal consistency index obtained for EIS is very close to the one presented by the authors in the test
description (Schutte et al., 1998). Regarding the Questionnaire for finding out the parental style - CSP,
the results show a good internal consistency for each of the five dimensions (authoritarian, permissive,
democratic, dictatorial, rejecting / neglecting).
To check the general hypothesis and the specific ones, we performed a correlational analysis and the
results are presented in Table 2.
Table 2. Correlations between emotional intelligence and parenting styles
Stilul parental CSP IE EIS (Schutte et al., 1998) IE BTPIE (Wood, Tolley, 2003)
Authoritarian parental style SAR-CSP r -.254* -.335**
Permissive parental style SPR-CSP r .352** .481**
Democratic parental style SDO-CSP r .266* .367**
Neglecting/rejecting parental style SRN-CSP r -.045 -.087
Dictatorial parental style SAT-CSP r -.429** -.440**
*
p < .05,
**
p < .01
The results obtained support the fact that between the level of development of the emotional
intelligence measured with the Emotional Intelligence Scale EIS (Schutte et al., 1998) and the
authoritarian parental style (r = -.254, p <.05) and the dictatorial one (r = -.429, p <.01) there is a negative
correlation, statistically significant. The permissive parental style (r = .352, p <.01) and the democratic
one (r = .266, p <.05) positively and statistically significantly correlate with the level of development of
the emotional intelligence, measured with the same instrument.
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The level of development of emotional intelligence measured by the Battery of Emotional Intelligence
Profile - BTPIE (Wood, Tolley, 2003) correlates: positively, statistically significant with the permissive
parental style (r = .481, p <.01) and the democratic style (r = .367, p <.01); negatively with the
authoritarian parental style (r = -.335, p <.01) and the dictatorial style (r = -.440, p<.01).
The parental style adopted by adults who have teenagers in their family influences the development of
the latter. Thus, parents who adopt the permissive or the democratic style forms adolescents able to:
identify and express their emotions, adopt a positive attitude, be honest with themselves and respect
themselves avoiding focusing only on logic and reason;
manage their own emotions and impulses, be more flexible, detached by problems and to express
emotions in an assertive manner;
channel their desire and endeavour to achieve the established goals, take initiative and maintain the
optimistic attitude towards the challenges of life;
identify and accept the feelings of others, to participate in emotional issues of the others avoiding
getting involved in solving them, to relate to the feelings and needs of the others without sacrificing
their own emotional experience;
to initiate, develop and maintain constructive and of high quality interpersonal relationships, to
communicate and collaborate effectively in group activities.
Parents who prefer the authoritarian and the dictatorial style are likely to form rigid, inflexible
teenagers, who need clear rules to feel safe, who do not take responsibility for their own feelings but
blame the others for them, who attack, command , criticize, interrupt, lecture, give advice to others,
issuing judgments of value about people, hide information or lie about their feelings, exaggerating or
minimizing their own feelings, who act according to feelings rather than talk about them and without
thinking about future feelings or the feelings of others.
4. Discussion and conclusions
The statistical analysis of the variables included in this research led to the confirmation of the general
hypothesis and the confirmation of four out of the five specific hypotheses. Thus, the results revealed that
the manner in which parents report to their adolescents leaves its mark on the level of development of the
emotional intelligence and on how they behave in interpersonal relationships. The teenagers ability to
manage their own emotions and impulses, to be more flexible, detached from problems and to express
emotions in an assertive manner depends to a large extent on the style adopted by the parents and the
relations between the family members. The statistical results support the need for designing and
implementing a developmental program focused on the development of parents emotional intelligence,
with positive effects on the personal development of their adolescents.
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