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=Emotional Intelligence and Dementia=

The terms emotional intelligence and dementia are considered by most people to antagonize each other. This is because both of them focus on the ability of the brain to memorize information. Whereas emotional intelligence reflects an excellent health status of the brain, dementia is associated with deteriorating health status of the brain. It is, hence, critical to analyse dementia in relation to other conditions that cause memory loss, such as Alzheimer’s disease, critically review the meaning of emotional intelligence, and discuss the association of emotional intelligence with dementia.

Definition of dementia– including Alzheimer’s disease
As opposed to the belief of most people that dementia is a disease, dementia is actually not a disease but a term that describes a collection of symptoms that severely affect one’s social abilities, thinking, and memory, and hinders the daily functioning of an individual. According to Morris (2013), dementia affects emotional life, personality, memory, and intelligence. It normally occurs alongside other diseases and may disappear when the underlying problem is treated. Dementia often progresses and evolves over many years, whereby the patient increasingly undergoes personality changes, gets confused, and becomes forgetful. A person living with dementia cannot even perform simple tasks at home and may need to receive more external care as time passes. Dementia is particularly common in the elderly people, with approximately 6% of the patients being 65 years and above, while 20% of them are over 85 years old. However, it should be recognized that most of the older people function well mentally. Most individuals fear that they might slip into dementia when they get old, despite the fact that short-term memory loss is a normal thing at old age. Although the risk of dementia increases as one gets old, it is also observed in the younger people. This is often referred to as pre-senile dementia, a type of Alzheimer’s disease. Even though dementia is particularly characterized by memory loss, the loss can be attributed to other factors. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common illness associated with progressive dementia, and it is widely spread among older people. The disease is a general term used to refer to memory loss and cognitive abilities severe enough to affect the daily life-functioning of a person. It accounts for nearly 60-80% of the dementia causes. Similar to dementia, Alzheimer’s disease is not only found in older people, but it also affects young adults. However, a majority of the patients are over 65 years old. Moreover, it is also progressive, where the symptoms of dementia gradually worsen as time passes. At the beginning, the short-term memory loss is mild but the person later loses the ability to carry on with conversation and respond to their environment.

Definition of emotional intelligence
According to McQueen (2014), emotional intelligence refers to the capacity of an individual to be aware of his/her emotions, to control those emotions, and express them. Additionally, it depicts the ability to handle interpersonal relationships empathetically and judiciously. In basic terms, emotional intelligence is the ability of a person to identify, assess, and modify his/her own emotions, as well as those of others. Emotional intelligence involves three skills; namely, emotional awareness, the capability of harnessing emotions and applying them to tasks such as thinking and problem-solving, and the capability of managing emotions including calming others down or cheering them up and regulating one’s own emotions. Mayer and Salovey (2003), classify emotional intelligence into five categories that include social skills, empathy, motivation, self-regulation, and self-awareness. Concerning social skills, people who quickly gain respect from those whom they meet and can build trust with others are considered to have high emotional intelligence. Empathic individuals refer to those who have compassion and can connect with others at emotional levels. They can respond genuinely to concerns raised by others. In regards to motivation, those who are driven by their inner ambitions, resilient, and self-motivated, as opposed to being influenced by external factors such as prestige or money, are considered to have high emotional intelligence. Concerning self-regulation, individuals with high emotional intelligence have the capacity to exercise control or restraint whenever they express their emotions. Lastly, those with a high sense of emotional intelligence are self-aware. They easily understand their strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, they also understand the effects of their actions on other people. An individual with emotional self-awareness is always receptive and learns from the constructive criticism, as opposed to those who do not have emotional self-awareness. Most employers seek to employ workers with high emotional intelligence. For example, most hiring managers and human resource staff ask particular questions to determine the emotional intelligence of the employees. Additionally, workers are often promoted based on the level of their emotional intelligence. As opposed to earlier practices, before where intelligent quotient tests were used to rate the emotional intelligence of a person, emotional intelligence tests now seek to determine how an individual can successfully deal with challenges he or she faces.

Relationship between emotional intelligence and dementia
The relationship between emotional intelligence is difficult to understand from a literal point of view. Whereas dementia is associated with illnesses, the level of emotional intelligence does not indicate whether a person is healthy or not. From a biological point of view, the concepts of dementia and emotional intelligence arise from the activities of the brain. Both concepts are associated with the hemispheres of the brain. The right-side hemisphere of the brain receives sensory information about emotions and processes the data. The information is then sent to the left hemisphere, responsible for language. The left hemisphere offers a name to the emotion detected on the right side. The corpus callosum, amygdala, and cerebellum facilitate the transfer of information between the two hemispheres. From this biological process, it can be assumed that the emotional intelligence of an individual is likely to be compromised if any of these parts of the brain is affected. Since dementia is associated with declining function of the brain, it is, therefore, assumed that dementia leads to a loss of emotional intelligence. Similarly, in most instances, the level of emotional intelligence is used to assess the health status of the brain. In fact, emotional intelligence has been used in some cases to diagnose dementia. This is because individuals with dementia are not in a position to rely on logic, facts, memory, and reason while making choices. Some people with low emotional intelligence show symptoms of dementia in the later stages of life. It is, hence, assumed that such people may have developed dementia during the early stage of development, leading to low emotional intelligence they exhibit. The symptoms of dementia begin to show later in life, only after the disease has progressed.