Introduction: Nowadays, many professionals consider necessary conditions for progress in developing emotional intelligence. A person who has a high emotional intelligence will experience less negative events in his/her life. The main purpose of this study is to answer this question: Is emotional intelligence related to happiness and mental health?
Method and material: Statistical community in this study is all the students of Medical sciences of Isfahan University in 2009, among whom 120 people were randomly selected and these three questionnaires were administered to them: 1) Bar-On Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire, 2) Goldberg and Williams's Mental Health Questionnaire (GHQ), and 3) Argyl and Lou's Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (1989). This study design is correlative that has been used to evaluate significance of the relationship of variables by using Pearson correlation coefficient and to compare the scores of male and female using T-test.
Result: The results show that there is a positive and meaningful relation between emotional intelligence, happiness and mental health. Besides, students with high emotional intelligence have more happiness and mental health. Therefore it is recommended that techniques of increasing emotional intelligence should be trained in school and universities.
Conclusion: The Overall EQ-I score was high indicating a group that has good Emotional Intelligence. There are fairly large differences in the scores for the 15 content scales indicating areas of relative strengths and areas of improvement and relation between mental healths in students. Emotional Intelligence will contribute to success in most endeavors.