Influence of Emotional Competence on Well-being among Adolescents

An attempt has been made to study the influence of Emotional Competence on Well-being among Male and Female Adolescents. The present study was conducted on 100 Adolescents (Male n=50 & Female n=50) using Simple Random Sampling. Emotional Competence and Wellbeing was assessed by using Emotional Competence Scale developed by J. S. Fulton Paiva and Dr. M. Suresh Kumar (2009) and Well-being scale developed by Jagsharanbir Singh and Dr. Asha Gupta (2001). The scale of Well-being consists of five dimensions viz ; Physical, Mental, Social, Emotional and Spiritual Well-being. After analyzing the data by Simple Linear Regression, the first finding showed the Emotional Competence appeared as a significant predictor of overall Well-being among Male Adolescents. It implies that there is a significant positive correlation between Emotional Competence and Overall Well-being among Male Adolescents. The second finding indicates that Emotional competence appeared as significant factor of Mental, Social, Emotional and Spiritual Well-being but not as factor of Physical Wellbeing. The third finding showed that Emotional Competence also appeared as a significant predictor overall Well-being among Female Adolescents. . It implies that there is a significant positive correlation between Emotional Competence and Overall Well-being among Female Adolescents. The last finding reveals that Emotional Competence significantly influences the degree of Physical and Emotional Well-being but doesn‟t influence the degree of Mental, Social and Spiritual Well-being. Well-being is a leading issue for every Individual, if Emotional Competence leads towards better Well-being among Individuals, let them express their inner feelings without any suppression.

It is that stage where the individual can either build up or destroy his/her career. It has been rightly said that adolescence is a period of stress and strain, storm and strike. In this competitive world, competition in every field particularly in education is very high for adolescents. Therefore, the adolescents need to have more competence to deal with the situations effectively. Adolescents should be able to cope with the stress, manage their emotions, and improve selfesteem, confidence, and decision making which leads to increase their wellbeing. Adolescents are the beneficial resources of the society. If an adolescent is competent, he/she will be able to get the job at the right place, which is beneficial for his own development and the development of the nation as a whole. However, the notion of emotional competence has acquired more attention and has been denoted as a strong predictor of success in life. Emotional competence (EC) can be understood as a group of general skills that can be applied to many types of emotion-related skills. The ability to identify and discriminate emotions is especially important in youth development and may be influenced by a person"s initial orientation to his/her emotionrelated problems. When an individual is less emotionally competent, he/she tries to keep away from thoughts and feelings related to the problems coming in his/her way. In such a case, he/she may fail to recognize emotions and thus be less able to resolve emotional problems in useful ways and less likely to accept his/her own feelings. Incompetent individual"s wellbeing is not guaranteed whereas competent adolescents pass all the hurdles of life. Emotional competence developing through the lifespan include emotional expression and experience, understanding emotions of self and others, and emotion regulation. Children become increasingly emotionally competent over time, and growing evidence suggests that such emotional competence contributes to their concurrent social competence and well-being, as well as to later social and academic outcomes Denham, Brown, & Domitrovich, 2010;Denham & Burton, 2003). Therefore, it seemed important to conduct a study in which Adolescents could be assessed in terms of their Emotional Competence and Well-being.

Emotional competence
Emotional competence refers to a person's ability in expressing or releasing their inner feelings (emotions). It implies an ease around others and determines our ability to effectively and successfully lead and express. Doing a thing is quite different from doing it well, where one can produce the type of effects, one desire, (White, 1959) may be termed as competence. To achieve and maintain a feeling of adequacy, the individual has to acquire a few workable assumptions about the world, Where need for competence emerges as most of the fundamental motive of life, because we survive through competence, grow through competence and actualize ourselves through competence (Allport, 1961). Boyatzis et al. offers a descriptive definition of emotional competence, "a person demonstrates the self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and social skills at appropriate times and ways in sufficient frequency to be effective in the situation"". Emotional competence contributes to the achievement of both intrapersonal (e.g., individual well-being) and interpersonal (e.g., maintenance of important social relationships) well-being (Eisenberg et al., 2001;Shipman and Zeman, 2001). Indeed, difficulties in identifying feelings and emotions underlie depression, anxiety, delinquency, and impaired friendships (Honkalampi et al., 2009). ), emotional competence as an understanding of one"s own and others" emotions and the ability to display emotions in a situation ally appropriate manner (Eisenberg et al., 1999). Individuals who lack these skills are often characterized in terms of alexithymia, which is a marked inability to identify, describe, and express one"s emotions.

Wellbeing
"Well-being is more than just happiness as well as feeling satisfied and happy ,well-being means developing as a person, being fulfilled, and making a contribution to the community" (Shah & Mark, 2004).
Well-being is one of the most important goals, which individuals as well as societies strive for. The term denotes that something is in a good state. It does not specify what the "something" is and what is meant by 'good'. Wellbeing can be specified in two ways: first by specifying the 'what' and secondly by spelling out the criteria of wellness (Veenhoven, 2004). So many terms such as happiness, satisfaction, hope, positive effect, well-being and quality of life have been used in the literature synonymously and interchangeably. The word 'well-being' is mostly used for specific variety of goodness, for example, living in a good environment, being of worth for the world, being able to cope with life, enjoying, etc. The concept of "wellbeing" suffers from definitional problem. In their systematic review of the definition, Pollard and Lee (2003) describe well-being as "a complex, multi-faceted construct that has continued to elude researchers' attempts to define and measure it". Wellbeing has been defined as a dynamic state characterized by reasonable amount of harmony between individual"s abilities, needs, expectations, environmental demand, and opportunities (Levi, 1987). It is connotative as a harmonious satisfaction of one's desires and goals (Checola, 1975). Well-being involves subjective satisfaction and individual pleasure depending upon psychological status of the individual and his environmental conditions. Competent emotional functioning is essential for well-being. The ability to recognize, identify, and describe one"s own and others" feelings are considered key aspects to emotional competence. While emotional competence includes aspects of emotion regulation (Shipman and Zeman, 2001).

LITERATURE REVIEW
Poor emotional competence have negative implications for youths" well-being, including difficulty forming friendships and poorer academic adjustment (Eisenberg et al., 1999).
Wellbeing has been found to decrease in early to middle adolescence and reach its lowest point at age; emotional competence is generally hypothesized to be a good predictor of one"s sense of subjective well-being. There is an assumption that emotionally competent individuals will have richer sense of subjective well-being. Zeidner and Olnick-Shemesh,(2010) summarized four reasons for this assumption. First, emotionally competent individuals are more aware of their emotions and more able to regulate them, which will contribute to experience higher levels of well-being. Second, the individuals with emotional competence are assumed to have richer social connections and are able to demonstrate better coping strategies. Third, with more accurate interpretation of the information yielded by the emotions and the environment, individuals with emotional competence can sustain a better sense of wellbeing. Fourth, provided that those with emotional competence would have the propensity to experience more positive affects, individuals are more prone to a richer sense of subjective well-being.
Ciarrochi and Scott,(2006) carried out a longitudinal study to investigate causal relations and the link between emotional competence and well-being. They found that people with effective problem orientation were less likely to experience depression, anxiety, and stress and were more likely to experience positive moods. Catalano et al. state that the enhancement of competence can help prevent other negative outcomes and is indicative of positive youth development. Individuals with high EC are able to identify their emotions as well as those of others, express them in a socially acceptable manner, understand their causes and consequences, regulate them when they are not appropriate to the context or to their goals, and use them to enhance thoughts and actions (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). While those individuals are able to take advantage of emotions without letting the latter lead them astray, individuals with low EC have a hard time taking into account the information emotions convey and are commonly overwhelmed by them

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Taking into consideration the objectives of the study, the following Research questions were formulated.

Sample
The students of Aligarh Muslim University served as sample in this study. Simple random sampling was used to select the participants. The total no. of participants consisted of 100 adolescents, with equal number of Male (n=50) and Female (n=50).

Procedure
The data of the present study was collected through personal contact with the participants individually or in small groups. Before administering the tools, the purpose of the study was explained to the participants and they were assured that their responses would be kept confidential and will be used for research purpose. After establishing the rapport with the participants, they were requested to fill the emotional competence scale and the scale of wellbeing. Emotional competence scale took 35 mints where as wellbeing scale took 40 mints to complete. In this way, the data was collected from the participants. The obtained data was analyzed by the means of simple linear regression.

Influence of Emotional Competence on Well-being among Adolescents
© The International Journal of Indian Psychology | 147     This table shows the model summary, which indicates one predictor of the model. The correlation was found to be R=.397. R Square change mentioned in the above table indicates the actual contribution of predictor variable to the criterion variable. Therefore, the original covariance, the magnitude of independent variable, which contributed to the dependent variable (Well-being), came out as 15.8%. The above table clearly shows that Emotional Competence (the predictor variable) influenced Well-being (Criterion). The Statistical value given in the table was found to be t = 2.99 which is significant for above-mentioned predictor that is Emotional Competence indicating a relationship between predictor and criterion variable Well-being.

RESULTS
The value of Partial Correlation is r = .397, therefore predictor significantly influenced the degree of Well-being; this finding indicates that Emotional Competence appeared as factor of Well-being among Female adolescents. The table indicates a significant positive correlation exists between Emotional Competence and Well-being among Female adolescents. It means that when Emotional Competence increases, Well-being also increases and when Emotional Competence decreases Well-being also decreases.

DISCUSSION
The present study was aimed to see the influence of Emotional competence on Well-being among male and female adolescents. The findings revealed that Emotional Competence appeared as a significant predictor of Well-being among both male and female adolescents. These findings are consistent with the findings of Zeidner and Olnick-Shemesh (2010), who found that emotionally competent individuals are more aware of their emotions and more able to regulate them, which will contribute to experience higher levels of well-being. Second, the individuals with emotional competence are assumed to have richer social connections and are able to demonstrate better coping strategies. Third, with more accurate interpretation of the information yielded by the emotions and the environment, individuals with emotional competence can sustain a better sense of well-being.
After determining the influence of Emotional competence on different dimensions of well-being among male and female adolescents. The findings revealed that Emotional Competence appeared as significant predictor of Mental, Social and Spiritual well-being among male adolescents, a significant positive correlation was also found between Emotional competence and Physical well-being and Emotional well-being among female adolescents. The overall well-being is consisted of Five dimensions that is Physical, Mental, Social, Emotional and Spiritual Wellbeing. These findings could be supported by the study conducted by Insiginificant correlations were found between Emotional competence and Physical Well-being among male adolescents. It means that if EC increases it neither influences nor deteriorates the physical well-being of male adolescents. The reason could be that the males are more curious about their physical built. Therefore they engage themselves in different types of physical exercises. As a result, their well-being remains intact. It hardly matters if male adolescents are emotionally competent or incompetent, they take care of their physical health in a best possible manner.
Insignificant correlations were also found between emotional Competence and Mental, Social and Spiritual Well-being among female adolescents. In the present scenario, females face stressful and anxiety provoking situations but with a mindset of competition with others they try to cope with these situations. Females also engage themselves in social gatherings and have friends more than the males. Females are more diverted towards their religion, they cannot discriminate in the name of religion. So far as the sample was taken from A.M.U. The religious environment might also be a factor for predicting their spiritual well-being. In the light of the above points, we can say that the Mental, Social and Spiritual well-being of Females remained intact whether they were emotionally competent or emotionally incompetent.

CONCLUSION
Emotional competence can have positive implications for adolescents" Well-being including better adjustment, good academic achievement, forming friendship, participate social gatherings etc. Emotionally competent adolescents can be able to cope with the stress and can sustain better sense of wellbeing, develop the confidence for attaining their goals.