Comparing Emotional Intelligence and General Health of Active and Non-Active Personnel of Physical Education Offices

This study set out to compare the personnel of the department of physical education of Khuzestan province, in terms of emotional intelligence and general health. This study is a descriptive study in which 134 members of the personnel that was between 32 and 59 years of age participated. Sixty of the participants were involved in sports activities (active) and 73 others were not involved in any sports activity (non-active). The instruments used in this study were personality traits questionnaire, the Schutteʹs emotional intelligence self-report test (Schutte et al., 1998)-including three components of appraisal and expression of emotions, regulation of emotions and utilization of emotions as well as general health questionnaire (Goldberg & Hillier, 1979) which measure general health on four subscales of somatic symptoms, anxiety, social dysfunction and depression. The data was analyzed using independent t-test and multivariate variance analysis (MNOVA) at confidence interval of 0.05. The results indicate a significant difference between the active and non-active personnel, in terms of emotional intelligence, and indicate that active personnel were significantly more emotionally intelligent than the non-active personnel. Despite the difference between general health’s mean score of the active and non-active personnel, which indicated that the active personnel were slightly healthier than the non-active personnel, there was no significant difference between these two groups of personnel. The results also showed that the female personnel had a higher level of emotional intelligence than the male personnel, but there was no significant difference between the male and female personnel in terms of general health. According to these results, participation in sports activities brings about a better utilization of emotions, and active individuals are better than non-active individuals at identification and utilization of emotions (a confirmation of the findings reported by Simons et al, 1992). In addition, these results demonstrate that sports activities, to some extent, provide the opportunity for enhancing physical and psychological performance (a confirmation of the findings reported by Moore and Werch, 2005). So, sport as a factor influencing emotional intelligence and general health should receive more attention.