Self-Esteem and Emotional Intelligence as Predictors of Depression Among Undergraduate

The study investigated self-esteem and emotional intelligence as predictors of depression among undergraduates. Four hundred and twenty-three (423) students comprise of 272 females and 151 males, with an age range of 17-22 years, a mean of 23.47 and SD of 5.43 were drawn as participants using availability and purposive sampling techniques as participants from population of Enugu State University of Science and technology (ESUT), University of Nigeria Nsukka Enugu campus (UNN) and Institute of Management Sciences (IMT) students. Zung (1965) Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS), Hudson (1992); index of Self-esteem (ISE) and Wong and Law (2002) Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS) were adopted for data collection, a correlational design was adopted, while hierarchical multiple regression was used for analysis. Three hypotheses were tested, and the results revealed that self-esteem and emotional intelligence failed to predict depression, as there was no remarkable relationship between the variables. There was no significant interaction effect among the predictor variables and the criterion variable at p< .05. Given the findings of the study, the researcher hereby suggests that students with positive mental attitudes can hardly fall into depression.