Relationship between intelligence, social skills and symptoms of depression in high school adolescents

This study aimed to investigate the links between social skills, intelligence and depressive symptoms in adolescents in the last year of high school. The participants of this research were 289 students being 163 girls, 126 boys, mean age 17,5 years, from public and private schools. The instruments used were: Abstract Reasoning Test (AR); Adolescent Social Skills Inventory (IHSA); and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). In the results we observe that most students are at absent/minima level of depressive symptoms; In the correlations we found positive results between depressive symptoms and social skills (difficulty) in subscales empathy, self-control, affect approach, social development; intelligence and social skills (frequency) in subscale empathy, self-control, civility, social development. The results showed to be significant, but with low correlation. Thus, the data suggest that adolescents are adapting situational adversity and they are managing to confront challenges to get to the beginning of the next stage of life without emotional damage.