Psychological characteristics of the emotional intelligence of urban and rural Internet users

The subject of the study is the study of the psychological characteristics of the emotional intelligence of urban and rural Internet users. The object of the study is the emotional intelligence of urban and rural youth prone to Internet addiction. The author examines in detail the degree of influence of the Internet on the emotional intelligence of young people living in urban and rural environments of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and interprets the peculiarities of their manifestation of emotional intelligence from the point of view of the region. The author suggests that young people who are prone to Internet addiction may lose control of their emotions. The importance of studying the psychological characteristics of people prone to Internet addiction is primarily related to the growth of Internet users. Meanwhile, there are different approaches to the positive and negative sides of the problem, which justifies the need for its detailed study.  The study used: the test "Internet addiction" by Kimberly Young in translation and modification by V.A. Loskutova (Burova); the method "Virtual identification of users of social networks" (VIPSS) by D.N. Pogorelov; the test "Emotional intelligence" by D.V. Lyusin. The Student's t-test and the method of correlation analysis were used as methods of mathematical statistics. The main conclusions of the study are that significant differences were found between urban and rural youth in terms of their propensity to Internet addiction, as well as certain differences in aspects of emotional intelligence. Thus, respondents who were not dependent on the Internet had a high level of emotional intelligence. The level of emotional intelligence was low among urban and rural citizens who use the Internet very actively and have a tendency to addiction. It was revealed that the propensity for Internet addiction among urban youth is higher than among rural youth, the difference is 99.9% (t=14,827; p≤0.05), which was observed in the subculture acceptability scale (t=1,995; p≤0.05). Regional differences were recorded in the study of respondents with general emotional intelligence (t=-4,352; p

tendency to Internet addiction, emotional intelligence, virtual environment, cyber addiction, Internet users, adoption of subculture, virtual image, urban youth, rural youth, psychological characteristics