Social and emotional intelligence in children with special educational need institutionalized: preliminary studies

Recent studies have come to show the need to complement traditional approaches of intelligence with other cognitive functions, such as the social and emotional intelligence (Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Goleman, 2006, Jones & Day, 1997). As these new dimensions to explore, which we will present the study aimed to describe the social and emotional intelligence and its relation to emotional and social skills in children with special educational institutions. The sample incorporated 20 children with special educational needs and 369 regular education children, aged between 7 and 13 years old, and were the following instruments: The Social Intelligence Test for Children, the Emotional Perception Test for children, the Test of Social Skills for children and the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. The results allow us to identify and evaluate the cognitive processes of social and emotional development of children in general and children’s special educational needs in particular and are a new way of looking at human skills and social skills and emotional.