Does Emotional Intelligence Affect Mental Toughness in Physically Disabled Athletes?

The aim of this research is to determine the determinative role of the emotional intelligence sub-dimensions (Assessing others emotions, evaluating their own emotions, regulating emotions, using social skills, use of emotion) in determining the levels of mental toughness of the athletes with disabilities. A total of 261 athletes from 165 disabled athletes (wheelchair basketball, amputee football, sitting volleyball, badminton), male (63.2%) (24.40±5.48 years old) and 96 female (36.0%) participated voluntarily. Within the scope of the research, information about socio-demographic variables was collected by the personal information form created by the researchers. To reach the purpose of the research; The Sport Mental Toughness Questionnaire made by Altıntaş and Bayar (2015) and the Emotional Intelligence Inventory in Sport adapted to Turkish by Adiloğulları and Görgülü (2015) were used. In the analysis of the data, firstly, when the skewness and kurtosis values for the normality assumptions were examined, it was determined that the distribution was normal. In this direction correlation analysis to determine the relationship between variables, stepwise regression analysis was used to determine the power of independent variables in predicting dependent variables. According to the findings obtained as a result of the research, it has been determined that the emotional intelligence levels of the athletes are important determinants of the mental toughness levels, and the analysis completed in three stages explains 56% of the variance.