Abstract
Objective
The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence of Emotional Intelligence (EI) research among 19 Latin American countries.
Participants and Method
Respective to each country, Total Life Science publications and Psychology publications were gathered from “UNESCO Science Report Towards 2030.” Population and GDP statistics pertaining to each country were derived from CIA Factbook. Mean education and percentage of GDP allocated for education were gathered from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. The databases SciELO and Redalyc were used to exhume the number of published Emotional Intelligence articles. The term “inteligencia emocional” was used. Findings were filtered to meet inclusion criteria: peer-reviewed, published between 2008-2018, corresponding to a Psychology related subject. Duplicate articles, those that did not contain the term “inteligencia emocional” in the abstract and articles that were not listed under the Psychology category were excluded.
Results
Data analysis of 19 countries from 2008-2014 revealed the mean number of Emotional Intelligence published articles to be 2.65 (SD = 5.54) articles per country - with a maximum of 22 and a minimum of 0. The percent of articles featuring EI in relation to Total Psychology articles published had a mean of 7% - with Minimum of 0% and Maximum of 60%. Bolivia has the highest percentage of articles on EI (60%), whereas Colombia the highest total number of articles published (n = 41). Population was significantly correlated with Total Articles Published and Total Psychology Articles Published.
Conclusions
Emotional Intelligence in Latin American countries is not widely investigated. Findings revealed 12 out of 19 Latin American countries had one or more publications related to Emotional Intelligence. While population was shown to be related to the number of articles published in Life Sciences and Psychology, it did not reveal a correlation with the publication of studies regarding EI. Furthermore, education and GDP were not related to the overall publication of articles.