Background & Objectives: Teachers, as one of the most important assets working in the educational organization and as influential role models, play a very important role in the formation of students' personalities. One of the psychological components that plays a significant role in the quality of teacher–student interactions and relationships is the emotional intelligence of teachers. Flow experience is another psychological component that is related to teachers' perceptions and their level of internal satisfaction with the work environment. Positive intelligence, as one of the constructs of the positive psychology approach, is defined as the maximum power to use mental abilities that help people find new psychological solutions, a positive attitude to daily hassles, and living in the moment. Positive intelligence leads to increased self–awareness, improvement in interpersonal interactions and relationships, improvement in the thinking and behavior, and rethinking the meaning and concepts of phenomena. This study aimed to investigate the effects of positive intelligence training on the emotional intelligence and flow experience of elementary school teachers.
Methods: The method of the present study is quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest design and a one–month follow–up. The statistical population included primary school teachers in Tehran in the academic year 2020. Forty–four elementary school teachers were selected conveniently regarding the inclusion and exclusion criteria and randomly allocated to the positive intelligence training group (n=22) and control group (n=22). The inclusion criteria were as follows: sufficient mastery of working with the Internet and how to participate in the webinar, necessary commitment and cooperation. The exclusion criteria included receiving a diagnosis of any psychiatric disorder based on a clinical interview, having a history of epileptic seizures during the last 2 years, having a medical condition that forces the person to seek immediate treatment, being absent more than 2 times in online training sessions, and being reluctant to continue participating in the study for any reason and at any time during the study. All participants were assessed at the pretest, posttest, and follow–up using an Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (Siberia Shirring, 1996) and Flow State Scale (Jackson & Eklund, 2002). Only the training group received eight 1–hour training sessions online. The content of the training intervention on positive intelligence, which is based on the positive psychology approach, included components of empathy, curiosity, the meaning of life, creativity, and flow. All training sessions were held online from 1 to 2 pm due to the special circumstances of the coronavirus outbreak. Data analysis was done in SPSS version 19 using the analysis of variance with repeated measures and subsequent post hoc methods. Also, in the analysis of the demographic characteristics of the sample members, including their educational status and marital status, the Chi–square test was used. Regarding the analysis of the age difference between the two groups, the t test of two independent groups was used. The significance level of statistical tests was considered at 0.05.
Results: Analysis of the demographic characteristics of the sample members showed no significant difference between teachers in the two groups of positive intelligence training and the control group in terms of age (p=0.319), educational status (p=0.339), and marital status (p=0.265). The results of repeated measures analysis of variance showed that the main effect of time (p<0.001), group (p<0.001), and the interaction of time and group (p<0.001) were also significant on emotional intelligence and flow experience. In the posttest stage, a significant difference was found between the training and control groups in the sub–components of self–motivation (p<0.001), self–awareness (p<0.001), empathy (p<0.001), social skills (p<0.001) and self–control (p=0.011) of emotional intelligence variable and flow experience variable (p<0.001). Also in the follow–up phase, there was a significant difference between the two groups in the sub–components of the emotional intelligence variable and the flow experience variable (p<0.001). There was a significant difference between the pretest–posttest (p<0.05) and pretest–follow–up (p<0.05) stages in the comparison of the changes in the sub–components of the emotional intelligence variable and the flow experience variable in the training group. However, no significant difference was observed between the posttest–follow–up stages (p>0.05), which indicated the stability of the changes resulting from the positive intelligence training package in the one–month follow–up.
Conclusion: Based on the findings of this research, positive intelligence training has successfully improved the level of emotional intelligence and the flow experience in primary school teachers. Therefore, its use is suggested for all teachers and trainers.