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: the 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 when reflecting on their time at school have reported that strong emotions were aroused by their classroom experiences, and that these greatly influenced their learning for better or worse. As professionals in this area we need a better understanding of these influences than common sense provides. So in the present chapter, I shall suggest how the model of intelligence outlined in Chapter 2 can be extended to include this important influence on our behaviour and learning.
