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This study explored the nature of the relationship between gender and emotional abilities of deaf as well as hearing adolescents of Pakistan. The sample consisted of 12 to 18 years old 469 deaf (197 female) and 1050 hearing (525 females) participants. These participants were selected from the high schools, located in the province of the Punjab, in order to assess the emotional abilities of participants, an indigenous scale named as Adaptive Emotional Abilities Scale (AEAS) was developed on the basis of Emotional Ability Model proposed by Mayer and Salovey in 1997. AEAS was reached to the acceptable levels of reliability and validity. Internal consistency for deaf as well as for hearing participants was (0.98); whereas split half reliability (odd-even) was 0.97 for deaf and 0.91 for hearing sample. Test re-test reliability was assessed on the hearing sample only and it turned out to be r=0.87. Proportion Consensus Method was used according to the consensus responses of hearing participants. The data of both of the groups were analyzed using SPSS. T-Test showed significant gender difference on AEAS. The results indicated the higher emotional abilities levels of both deaf and hearing females as compared to their male counterparts.
Keywords: Deaf; Emotional Intelligence; Proportion Consensus Scoring
Introduction & Literature Review
Mayer and Salovey (1990 & 1997) defined emotional intelligence (El) as a mental ability. According to their Emotional Ability Model (1997), El comprises of four emotional abilities namely emotional recognition, emotional facilitation, emotional understanding and emotional management. They proposed that Individuals vary in their ability to process information of an emotional nature and to relate emotional processing to a wider cognition. They posited that this ability is seen to manifest itself in certain adaptive behaviors (Mayer, Salovey & Caruso, 2000). Mayer and Salovey (1997) defined emotional intelligence as:
"The ability to perceive emotions, to access and to generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and Intellectual growth" ( R10).
In other words adaptive emotional abilities refer to use emotions to facilitate our thinking by accurate recognition of emotions of the self and others to apply the emotional knowledge to solve the emotional problems according to the situation and circumstances so...