A Study Of The Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence And Intercultural Acculturation Among Chinese Overseas Students

With the increasing number of people studying abroad, the acculturation problems those Chinese international students encounter have aroused many researchers and scholars’ attention. Similarly, emotional intelligence also attracts more and more researchers to study since it plays an important role in the success of life, and it can better reflect the individual’s emotional regulation and social adaptation. Also, many researches prove that people with high level of emotional intelligence have rational and stable emotions. They can better identify their own and others’ emotions. Meanwhile they can make appropriate coping strategies. On the contrary, people with low level of emotional intelligence have difficulties judging their own and others’ emotions correctly, giving rise to their low communication ability and low social acculturation. Therefore, it is significant to make a study on the relationship between emotional intelligence and intercultural acculturation.Based on the literature reviews of emotional intelligence and intercultural acculturation, this paper does a specific and empirical study on Chinese overseas students who are studying abroad for further study. This paper mainly attempts to study the following three research questions: 1. What are the major existing problems and difficulties when Chinese overseas students study abroad? Are the emotional intelligence and intercultural acculturation the two major ones? 2. What is the relationship between emotional intelligence and intercultural acculturation? 3. How can Chinese overseas students’ intercultural acculturation be more adapted by arousing their emotional intelligence so as to solve some problems and difficulties during the process of acculturation?This paper applies both quantitative and qualitative research methods in order to answer the above research questions. Quantitative research is conducted among 34 Chinese overseas students by finishing two questionnaires in order to know their general level of emotional intelligence and intercultural acculturation. Qualitative research is done among three participants chosen from the 34 participants. All the data collected from the two questionnaires are analyzed through SPSS 16.0 from the aspects of descriptive statistics, frequency distributions, gender and grade differences analysis and correlation analysis. And the qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews are analyzed through descriptive language.The final results are concluded as: 1. For Chinese overseas students, emotional intelligence and intercultural acculturation are really their two major problems. More specifically, the language acculturation, daily life acculturation and academic acculturation are the major ones. 2. For the gender and grade differences of these overseas students, there is no significant difference on emotional intelligence and intercultural acculturation. But for the correlation analysis, there exists a positive correlation between those overseas students’ emotional intelligence and their intercultural acculturation. And for the correlation of each dimension, there exist correlations between emotional intelligence and five dimensions of intercultural acculturation except for academic studies and psychological endurance. The results have some implications for middle school and college education. Some suggestions are put forward to students, teachers, schools and the society based on the results of the study.