Introduction:

The course of studies they choose is the main factor for depression or anxiety in health sciences students, who have high rates of these disorders. Nevertheless, those students with good emotional intelligence show fewer physical symptoms, or symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Objectives:

We aimed to determine the association between emotional intelligence and levels of anxiety and depression in medical students.

Materials and methods:

analytical, cross-sectional, retrospective, non-probabilistic observational study, of convenience sampling. The research included 276 students, who were evaluated with the TMMS-24 test, the Beck Depression Inventory - second version (BD-II) and the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7). Descriptive statistics were used for all variables. The chi-square test was used to search for associations between categorical variables. To determine correlation between variables, Pearson's correlation coefficient was used, considering p <0.05 as significant in all cases.

Results:

65.5% of the sample was female, aged between 18 and 31 years (21.79 ± 2.66). 61.4% of the participants had symptoms of depression and 67.7% symptoms of anxiety. Significance was found in relation to sex and emotional intelligence (attention and repair of emotions), as well as between emotional intelligence (clarity and repair of emotions) with the average levels of depression and anxiety. Females had a higher relative risk for anxiety and depression.

Conclusion:

In medical students there is a high tendency to develop symptoms of depression and anxiety, which are related to emotional intelligence.

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