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I'm Dr Joanne Emery and I work in the statistics team in the research division of Cambridge Assessment.

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There are different definitions of emotional intelligence.

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It covers a whole range of emotional and social skills and behavioural tendencies.

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But put very basically, it's people's ability to recognise and manage their own emotions and also those of other people.

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It includes things like being able to motivate yourself and to carry on despite difficulties,

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being able to control your impulses and moods

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being able to empathise with and get along with other people

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and also being able to express yourself emotionally.

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As educational researchers we're interested in why some children make more progress at school than others

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and we felt that emotional intelligence as well as conventional academic ability

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might affect achievement at school.

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It seemed a very plausible idea that factors like motivation and emotion management would affect learning outcomes

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and psychologists working in this area have claimed for a while that these kind of skills can predict achievement

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both at school and also later on in life in people's careers.

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In recent years there's been a government initiative to actually teach emotional and social skills to school children

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and the intention is to improve their achievement as well as their behaviour.

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So we wanted to see if higher emotional intelligence really is related to greater success at school We used a questionnaire measure of emotional intelligence which measures people perceptions

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of their own abilities and we gave this out to a sample of almost 2,000 British students

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who were taking GCSE science exams and we looked at the amount of progress these students had made

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between the national tests they took at age 14 and their GCSE grades in different science subjects.

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What we found was that if you take students with the same attainment at age 14,

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then it's those with the higher overall emotional intelligence scores

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that are more likely to do better in the GCSE sciences.

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But we found that it affected some science subjects more than others.

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It had the strongest effect in the vocational applied science subject

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and had the least effect in physics.

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Two particular aspects of emotional intelligence,

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which were self-motivation and low impulsiveness,

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predicted progress in all of the science subjects we looked at.

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But on the other hand, other aspects such as emotion, expression and assertiveness

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were not related to progress in any of them.

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In the next phase of the research,

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we're going to look at the same students' grades in all their other GCSE subjects.

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We think that emotional intelligence might have an even greater impact in subjects like English, art and drama

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where understanding people's emotions is more obviously related to the course content