ABSTRACT

Mainstream psychology has tended either to ignore emotions, or to regard them as irrational influences, distractors, which disturb our normal thinking processes. This is in accordance with everyday usage: my Concise Oxford Dictionary defines emotion as 'agitation of mind, feeling; excited mental state.' However, I believe that the separation of cognitive from affective processes is an artificial one, which does not accurately reflect human experience. In particular, many students have reported that strong emotions have been aroused by their classroom experiences, and that these have strongly influenced their learning for better or worse. In Chapter 7, I made a first approach to the subject. In this chapter, I suggest how the model of intelligence outlined in Chapter 8 can be extended to include this important influence on our behaviour and learning.