Over the last few decades, the term intelligence has broadened in meaning. It has shifted from a more traditional perspective to one that also takes emotions into account. In this regard, some studies focus precisely on individual differences in how people process, analyse and show their emotions (Salguero et al., 2010).

Thus, there is a growing concern for emotional intelligence in different contexts. As Santos Rego and Lorenzo (2000, p. 227) point out "emotional intelligence is a different way of being intelligent". Nelis et al. (2009) also suggest that it can influence the level of success that a person can achieve in life.

People with emotional intelligence are able to respond to stressful situations in a more flexible way, preventing the associated negative emotions or, if they are present, focusing them from a positive perspective (Ortega , 2010). In this sense, the development of emotional intelligence will make it possible to promote people's well-being by being able to optimise their lives and vital circumstances and events (Cruz et al., 2017).

Therefore, these emotional competencies, that allow us to recognise and manage our own and other people's emotions, are a key element in higher education, especially in Education Sciences degrees. According to Extremera and Fernández-Berrocal (2004) and Cabello et al. (2010), the development of these competencies will enable students to cope with work-related stress in the future and to learn to recognise and respond more appropriately to the emotional needs of the population they work with.

Furthermore, the role of these professionals will be fundamental in the development of socioemotional competences of the group they will attend. In this sense, it should not be forgotten that they can function as facilitators of learning motivation and contribute to students' academic performance and educational success (Durlak et al., 2011; García-Martínez et al., 2023).

Knowing the emotional competences of Education Sciences students allows us to analyse their training needs and offer perspectives for improvement for this group and others with similar characteristics. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to analyse the type of emotional intelligence of Education Sciences students in a Spanish university. This information will allow us to draw up competence profiles in relation to the students' ability to attend to, understand and regulate emotions. In this way, it will be possible to offer training proposals in order to respond to the perceived deficiencies or to strengthen those competencies that are less developed and that are also considered essential for the professional career of these students.

This work is part of a doctoral thesis which has been supported by the Government of Spain through a pre-doctoral contract for “University Professor Training (FPU18/01858)”.

The methodological approach used has been quantitative. For this study, it has been applied the Spanish version of the "Trait Meta-Mood Scale" (Fernandez-Berrocal, 2004), which has already been validated with similar groups in several studies. This scale provides information about the level of emotional intelligence based on three factors: attention (awareness of one's own emotions), understanding (ability to identify and recognise emotions) and regulation of one's own emotions (ability to control emotions). The response is Likert-type (1= strongly disagree / 5= strongly agree). The total number of items to be answered is 24. The first 8 items are related to the first factor (emotional attention), the 8 intermediate items correspond to the second factor (emotional understanding) and the last 8 are related to the capacity for "emotional regulation". The sum of the scores obtained for each factor is compared with the corresponding scale and this allows the scores to be distributed as "low", "adequate" or "excellent" for each dimension. The participating sample is of 351 students aged between 20 and 38. Specifically, 124 from the Bachelor's degree in Primary Education (28 men and 96 women), 93 from the Bachelor's degree in Pedagogy (14 men and 79 women), 79 are students from the Bachelor's degree in Early Childhood Education (6 men and 73 women) and 54 from the Bachelor's degree in Social Education (7 men and 47 women). The reason for choosing this group was conditioned by the possibility of access to the sample, and because it is a fairly representative group, at regional level, in terms of the training received by some of the future education professionals. The data collection process was carried out between March and April 2022. For this purpose, after agreement with the responsible teaching staff, the first 10 minutes of class were used to let students fill in the questionnaire. The whole process was accompanied by the corresponding ethical considerations and has the favourable report of the Bioethics Committee. The IBM SPSS Statistics version 25 software was used for data analysis.

In general terms, attention to emotions (M=30.68) is a much more developed dimension among future professionals if we compare it with understanding (M=25.88) and emotional regulation (M=25.89). It is also these dimensions that obtain the highest number of scores at the "low" level, with 36.76% and 38.91% respectively. It could be said, then, that although awareness of emotions has increased, understanding and regulation have not, which could be influenced by the discourse on mental health and concern for emotions in recent years. This confirms the need to improve the levels for a large proportion of the sample, as the literature suggests that those with low scores in emotional understanding and regulation show excessive levels of stress, more social anxiety and greater depression. Specifically, the different analyses applied show that there are no significant differences between degrees. However, there are significant differences between men and women. Women pay greater attention to their emotions [p=.033. M(men)=29.25; M(women)=30.95], while men show greater emotional regulation and predisposition to impulse control [p=.001; M(men)=28.13; M(women)=25.48], as supported by similar studies. For this reason, it is relevant to take into account the gender perspective in order to better adapt training proposals, given that, in addition, degrees related to Education Sciences tend to be quite feminised. In short, being aware of these realities allows us to be in a position to offer training proposals and educational improvements for students of Education Sciences. As we have said at the beginning, if these professionals develop their emotional intelligence, this will have a positive impact on their academic performance. At the same time, it will also improve their personal wellbeing and influence their job satisfaction and future career development.

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