The concept of «emotional intelligence» is one of the most discussed in modern psychology. Emotional intelligence tests are published in scientific and popular literature but it is not always obvious whether they measure namely intelligence or, however, a definite set of personality traits. The authors have made an attempt to create a measure for diagnostics of emotional intelligence as an ability to solve divergent and specific tasks which are concerned with emotions. As a result of several stages of experts’ evaluation a set of questions has been formed which were approved in a pilot study which revealed the existence of gender specificity and no professional specificity of emotional intelligence. Two groups of schoolchildren were compared with respect to the mentioned indices: the first of which studied according to a profound curriculum in some subjects and the other one studied according to the general curriculum. The differences between the two groups were obtained in respect to all of the mentioned phenomena. Part of them is evidence to a better socio-psychological adaptation of schoolchildren from specialized classes whereas the other differences stand for a higher level of adaptation of children with special educational needs who study in usual classes.  The obtained results allow formulating practical recommendations on how to increase the level of socio-psychological adaptation of children with special educational needs.