IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HIGHER EDUCATION: A STUDY ON THE EFFECT OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TOWARD STUDENTS’ PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING IN UNIVERSITI MALAYSIA SARAWAK (UNIMAS)

Online distance learning is one of the changes that has been implemented in Malaysia to overcome the spread of the COVID-19 virus. These changes have led to a social restriction which mainly causes students to experienced isolation, arises worries, and also causes distress. Emotional intelligence is a part of cognitive processing which involves the awareness of own emotions and other and also the ability to facilitate and manage own emotions. Having a good degree of emotional intelligence will enable the participants to facilitate, manage and aware of their own emotions during this pandemic, also it can help and encourage students to practice a good and healthy lifestyle which will result in a good and healthy psychological well-being. A cross-sectional study has been conducted to study the correlation between emotional intelligence and the psychological well-being of the students due to the impact of COVID-19. This study involves 320 undergraduate students from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), Kota Samarahan, Sarawak. The measurement instrument used to conduct this research are the English version of the Trait Meta Mood Scale-24, and also the EPOCH Measure of Adolescent Well-Being. The hypotheses have been tested by using a Pearson Correlation Coefficient, and the result has shown that there is a strong positive relationship between emotional intelligence and the psychological well-being of students. This indicates, the participants experienced a higher level of emotional intelligence during this pandemic, and it directly affects the students’ psychological well-being which also recorded a high level. To further improve this study, future researchers were suggested to conduct a study with a large population in order to generalize the data among students in higher institutions