Emotions and Intelligence

Knowledge Question: To what extent are emotions part of intelligence?

Definition against:

“The ability to use memory, knowledge, experience, understanding and judgement in order to solve problems ” AllWords Dictionary, 2006

Definition for:

“the general mental ability involved in calculating, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, learning quickly, storing and retrieving information, using language fluently, classifying, generalising  and adjusting to new situations.” Columbia Encyclopedia, sixth edition, 2006 

“Sensory capacity, capacity for perceptual recognition, quickness, range or flexibility or association, facility and imagination, span of attention, quickness or alertness in response.” F. N. Freeman 

First of all as we can see in the definitions above, emotions aren't always involved and that makes me question why? Well, since a lot of psychologists and scientist usually disagree on whether emotion is involved or not caused these different definitions that in some way are similar. In my opinion, emotions should be considered to be a part of intelligence. It is intelligence because when people are born, they are born with skills such as ability to reason and children from an early age have an ability to detect emotions around them (for example Mayer stated that babies know when their parents are angry at them). Also people usually make decisions based on their emotions. 

Most of the time emotions are not considered to be a part of intelligence because it's hard measure EI. However Dr. Salovey, Dr. David Caruso and John. D. Mayer developed a new set of 12 ability tasks that assess this four-branch model. These ability tasks include asking people to identify emotions in faces as well as asking people to identify a set of simple emotions which, when combined, match a more complex feeling. The research with these new scales showed that emotional intelligence can be measured reliably, exists as a unitary ability, and is related to, but independent of, standard intelligence

Mayer et al also have concluded from his research that emotional intelligence does indeed meet these traditional criteria of a standard intelligence, such as breaking it out in several sets of mental abilities, is intercorrelated, abilities have a positive correlation to traditional intelligence

Even though these are only few claims that show that emotional intelligence is intelligence and there were a lot of counterclaims against it , I still think that emotions play an important role in intelligence. Without emotions people wouldn't know how to perceive relationships with other people or how to adjust to new situations, which are both very important aspects in the definition of intelligence since they are, repeated a lot of times in different definitions.