THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ANXIETY AND SOCIAL COMPETENCES IN PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

It is generally known that long-term exposure to both positive and negative stressful events may cause the development of anxiety. Anxiety is a natural emotion experienced by everybody. This emotion is not always negative because it is often helpful and has an adaptive effect. It should also be noted that anxiety is part of everybody's life; the problem is if the frequency and intensity of anxiety experiencing have an increasing tendency that starts to cause problems in everyday life. As the university students are initially meeting with more demanding requirements as gaining new knowledge, skills and experience, the academic environment can easily become a trigger for anxiety. The way in which students' process and interpret the new experience is conditioned by the influences of the environment and its biological, innate dispositions. The gained emotional experiences associated with the academic success could negatively affect both students' performance and their attitude to study in general as well they have a big impact on their social status and acceptance by the other classmates and teachers. Social competences are often described as skills whose level significantly influences the course and quality of communication. Social competences create the basis for socially competent behavior of an individual in specific situations. Competences therefore correspond to the potential that a person has, and which may not always be the same in different situations. The aim of our survey was to find out the possible relationship between the anxiety and the social competences of pre-service teachers. The data were obtained through two questionnaires: State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Trait version and the Social Competence Inventory (ISK, Kanning) which consists of 4 scales focused on social orientation, offensive, self-control and reflexibility. The research sample consisted of 443 students (mean age = 24.59, SD = 6.05, range = 18-54 years), of which 88 were men (mean age = 26.66, SD = 6.96, range = 18-51 years) and 355 females (mean age = 24.07, SD = 5.69, range = 19-54 years).The existence of a significant negative relationship was confirmed between the anxiety and all social competences except the scale reflexibility.