title: Emotional Intelligence among Dental Undergraduate Students: An Indispensable and Ignored Aspect in Dentistry.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Emotional intelligence (EI) is a measure of pure intelligence of cognitive ability that translates psychological knowledge into terms that are useable by people not professionally trained in psychology, like dentists.
  
  
  METHODS
  A cross-sectional, self-administered, structured questionnaire survey in English was distributed among 186 undergraduate students to assess their EI. It consisted of 30 questions, 5 each to assess the self-awareness, empathy, self-confidence, motivation, social control, and self-competency. All the participants were asked to answer each question, anything between virtually never to virtually always using the rating scale 1-5.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The collected data were analyzed using statistical software SPSS version 20 (Chicago, Inc.). The mean, median, and mode for various responses between the groups were compared. Only 11.55% of the participants had good EI with scores above 20 in all domains, while a majority of 54.02% proved to have average EI. A mere 2.05% showed to have very poor EI and 28.84% demonstrated poor EI.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The study showed that only 11.55% had a good EI and a major percentage of the students require immediate intervention to improve their EI.
authors.affiliation: Professor and Head, Department of Pedodontics and Preventive Dentistry, Drs Sudha and Nageswara Rao Siddhartha Institute of Dental Sciences, Chinoutpally, Gannavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: K S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Ravichandra
authors.affiliation: Reader, Department of Pedodontics and Preventive Dentistry, Drs Sudha and Nageswara Rao Siddhartha Institute of Dental Sciences, Chinoutpally, Gannavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: G R
authors.initials: GR
authors.lastname: Ravi
authors.affiliation: Senior Lecturer, Department of Pedodontics and Preventive Dentistry, Drs Sudha and Nageswara Rao Siddhartha Institute of Dental Sciences, Chinoutpally, Gannavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: Chaitanya Ram
authors.initials: CR
authors.lastname: Kandregula
authors.affiliation: Associate Professor, Department of Public Health Dentistry, Drs Sudha and Nageswara Rao Siddhartha Institute of Dental Sciences, Chinoutpally, Gannavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: Sudhakar
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Vundavalli
authors.affiliation: Senior Lecturer, Department of Pedodontics and Preventive Dentistry, Drs Sudha and Nageswara Rao Siddhartha Institute of Dental Sciences, Chinoutpally, Gannavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: Koya
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Srikanth
authors.affiliation: Senior Lecturer, Department of Pedodontics and Preventive Dentistry, Drs Sudha and Nageswara Rao Siddhartha Institute of Dental Sciences, Chinoutpally, Gannavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: Disha
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lakhotia
keywords: Emotional intelligence; empathy; motivation self-awareness; self-competency; self-confidence; social control