Emotional Intelligence, Empathy, and Quality of Life in Patients with Type 1 Diabetes

Abstract

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic medical condition that imposes continuous emotional, cognitive, and behavioral self-management demands on patients. The present study examined the relationships among emotional intelligence, empathy, and diabetes-specific quality of life in adults with Type 1 diabetes, and evaluated gender differences across these variables. A cross-sectional correlational research design with non-probability purposive sampling was used to recruit N=100 patients with Type 1 diabetes (35 men, 65 women) aged 25–40 years from medical centers in Lahore, Pakistan. Participants completed a demographic profile form, the Brief Emotional Intelligence Scale (BEIS-10), the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ), and the Diabetes-Specific Quality of Life Scale (DSQOLS). Internal consistency reliability ranged from acceptable to excellent (α = .74–.95). Pearson correlation analyses indicated that empathy had a strong positive relationship with quality of life (r = .70, p < .001), whereas emotional intelligence was strongly and negatively correlated with quality of life (r = -.70, p < .001) and moderately negatively correlated with empathy (r = -.52, p < .001). Two-step hierarchical regression showed that emotional intelligence accounted for 49% of the variance in quality of life (β = -.70, p < .001). Adding empathy in Step 2 significantly increased explained variance by 14% (ΔR² = .14, p < .001), with the full model explaining 63% of total variance. Empathy emerged as a positive predictor (β = .44, p < .001), whereas emotional intelligence remained a negative predictor (β = -.47, p < .001) of quality of life. An independent samples t-test revealed no statistically significant gender differences in quality of life, emotional intelligence, or empathy (p > .30). These findings highlight the critical role of interpersonal empathy in enhancing quality of life among Type 1 diabetes patients and suggest that high self-reported emotional hyper-awareness without adaptive coping may exacerbate illness perception burden.