Date of Award

Summer 8-2020

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Program

Counselor Education

Department

Counselor Education

Major Professor

Dr. Roxane Dufrene

Second Advisor

Dr. Christopher Belser

Third Advisor

Dr. Zarus Watson

Abstract

Abstract

Although emotional intelligence and personality are extensively researched topics, the two concepts are rarely studied within the context of counselor education. Thus, the purpose of the present research was to explore the relationships between 134 counseling students’ demographics, academic experience, emotional intelligence, and personality types who were enrolled in Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) accredited programs in southern Louisiana and Texas. Students completed a Demographic Survey, the Mayer-Caruso-Salovey Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), and Jung’s Typology Test (JTT™). The ability model of emotional intelligence that was developed by Salovey and Mayer (1990) was used as the conceptual framework for the research, which includes four branches: a) emotional perception, b) emotional integration, c) emotional understanding, and d) emotional management. The results included descriptive statistics that indicated female counseling students had higher overall emotional intelligence and were more emotionally perceptive and integrative than male students. Also, younger counseling students were more emotionally integrative than older students. Correlations for students’ race and overall emotional intelligence, emotional integration, and understanding were significant. Counseling students with an affective theoretical orientation were more emotionally understanding than students with a cognitive theoretical orientation. Students with cognitive or affective theoretical orientations preferred Intuition over Sensing in their personality types. Five multiple regression analyses were analyzed. First, students’ gender, race, number of coursework hours completed, and number of years of graduate study explained 16.8% of the variance in their overall emotional intelligence scores. Second, for emotional perception, students’ gender and the number of years of graduate study accounted for 6.5% of the variance. Third, students’ gender, age, and race explained 14.3% of the variance in emotional integration. Fourth, for emotional understanding, students’ race, number of coursework hours completed, number of years of graduate study, and students with personality types of Introversion and Perceiving accounted for 30.7% of the variance. Finally, students’ age and Feeling personality type explained 6.9% of the variance in emotional management.

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The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.

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