Key words: emotional intelligence, cognitive processes, emotions, behaviour, communication, reactions.

It is not a secret that the effectiveness of language learning mainly depends on cognitive processes occurring in the brain. As emotions play a great role in the language learning process too, it is reasonable to drawa connection between emotions one experiencesand cognitive processes happening in his brain. This article describes the notion of emotional intelligence and its relationship to psychological processes.

Each emotion contains a specific system of identifiable signals - emotional information that can be transmitted both through human communication channels and through unique patterns of associative signals using proprioceptive, affective and cognitive channels. Emotional signals of this kind convey information about individual assessments and motivated reactions to relationships and their changes. Emotional information includes the meanings of individual emotions, emotional patterns and their sequence, as well as an assessment of the relationships that they reflect [3, p. 200-203].

Emotions carry certain meanings. For example, the experience of anger often indicates the presence of real or imagined injustice or blockade of a passionately desired goal. Experience of sadness indicates the presence of real or perceived loss. It should be added that there is an evolutionary basis for the meanings of basic emotions. Moreover, emotions arise in predictable patterns that develop in conjunction with social situations.

Emotions are ordered reactions that cross the boundaries of many psychological subsystems, including physiological, cognitive, motivational, empirical. These are adaptive responses that focus on cognitive activity and subsequent actions. Emotions guidebehaviour, perform a signalling function and motivate responses to a certain situation.

The distinction between emotions and cognitions is to a certain extent theoretical, conceptual. It makes no sense to talk about a purely emotional, mental or purely physiological reaction because certain mental or neurological processes can be part of both emotional and cognitive behaviour, although their degree of importance and proximity to the center varies.

The concept of the existence of separate cognitive and emotional systems is outdated and inconsistent with most studies aimed at investigating the relationship between emotional and cognitive processes. It is based on the erroneous opinion that cognitive processes, unlike emotional ones, are processed slowly and are of a reasonable, logical nature. However, this is not quite true. In fact, cognitive processes often proceed very quickly, are based on the parallel processing of information and lead to the generation of impulsive actions based on the automatic extraction of schematic information from memory. In turn, emotional processes, which are often described as instantaneous and irrational, are based on information processing and symbolic representations of meanings, although these representations are usually not realized.

The most common definition of intelligence is as follows: a set of abilities, or the global ability of an individual to act purposefully, think rationally and communicate effectively with the environment. Emotional intelligence is considered as one of the types of intelligence.

 Individuals with a high level of development of emotional intelligence have pronounced abilities to understand emotions, express emotions and control the emotional sphere, which leads to higher adaptability and efficiency in communication and daily life.

A number of researchers consider emotional intelligence as a substructure of social intelligence. However, there is another point of view too: emotional intelligence is considered as a broader concept, and social intelligence - as one of its aspects. It is possible that such ideas are related to the fact that in some studies the ability for social interaction is based on the preliminary development of individual structural components of emotional intelligence.

Social intelligence is understood as an integral intellectual ability that determines the success of communication and social adaptation, adaptability to human life. Thus, if we understand intelligence as a general ability to adapt to environmental changes, then social intelligence is a part of it that contributes to adaptation to society as a whole, to other people and oneself in particular.

However, the problem is that, despite many studies in this area, the independence of social intelligence from its other types (in particular, from verbal intelligence) has not been demonstrated[1, p. 504].

Despite such a pessimistic beginning, the problem of social intelligence is currently attracting an increasing number of researchers, since this type of intelligence is a very important practical quality, and with the development of research, new and non-obvious areas of its application are discovered.

In the structure of social intelligence, emotional intelligence includes the ability to observe one's own emotions and the emotions of other people, distinguish them and use this information to control thinking and actions. Emotional intelligence, together with social intelligence, is referred to the so-called operational types of intelligence that function on social, practical, personal and emotional information.

Emotional intelligence is sometimes seen as part of interpersonal intelligence. This is not entirely legitimate, sinceemotional intelligence contains not only an interpersonal but also an intrapersonal aspect. Unlike social intelligence, emotional intelligence includes internal, personal emotions that are significant primarily for personal growth. It focuses mainly on the emotional, rather than social, aspects of the problem.

Partial identification of social and emotional intelligence is associated with the recognition of a number of socially-communicative abilitiesin the structure of emotional intelligence such as social skills, awareness of social interactions and the ability for perceptual-interpretive recognition of emotions in an interpersonal context. These abilities correspond to the traditional understanding of social intelligence as a set of mental abilities associated with the processing of social information and contributing to the success of interpersonal interaction.

The unifying category for emotional and social intelligence is "communication", and the distinguishing characteristic is the direction of communication. The communicative potential of emotional intelligence is aimed primarily at the production and comprehension of one's own emotional experiences regarding situations of interpersonal communication, while the capabilities of social intelligence are focused on interpersonal interaction. The actualization of emotional and social intelligence occurs in various spheres of communication: in the first of them - in the sphere of emotional communication, in the second - in the sphere of interpersonal communication. For emotional intelligence, communication is a stimulus, and for social intelligence - a target purpose.

Unlike abstract and concrete intelligence, which reflect the patterns of the external world, emotional intelligence reflects the inner world and its connections with personality behaviour and interaction with reality. Emotional intelligence does not contain general ideas about oneself and the assessment of others. It focuses on learning and using one's emotional states and the emotions of others to solve problems and regulate behaviour.

 The end product of emotional intelligence is decision-making based on reflection and realization of emotions which are considered as differentiated assessments of events that have personal meaning. Thus, emotional intelligence is at the heart of emotional self-regulation.

Unlike personality traitswhich are static and strategic, emotional abilities are made up of transient, tactical, dynamic skills and abilities that can be triggered by the situation.

It is known that people differ in the amplitude and frequency of changes in the dominant emotional states at a certain point in time [2, p. 805-807]. The more often one emotional state is replaced by another and the greater the amplitude of such fluctuations, the more a person is considered emotionally labile. In this regard, we can talk about emotional fluency,similar to speech fluency. The difference lies only in the fact that the individual is able to quickly and efficiently generate emotions and associated thoughts, and not words. The wider the range of emotions a person experiences, the more thoughts associated with them come into his mind. In the arsenal of individuals prone to the variability of experiences, there are more alternative assessments of upcoming events, tactics of behaviour in various situations and models of the future, and they have a greater chance of making the best use of the advantages of one choice or another.

Emotional experiences can help you address your priorities in lifemore effectively. Emotions direct attention to stimuli that need to be processed, contribute to focus on vital needs and goals. For example, if there is a discrepancy between personal expectations and the surrounding reality, emotional experiences can become more intense, directing attention to the person himself in order to clarify the essence of the event and facilitate an adaptive response to it.

And finally, individuals with developed emotionality are characterized by pronounced attention to feelings, the ability to distinguish between those emotions and confidence in the ability to emotional self-regulation. The strategy of being open to emotional experiences fosters empathy with other people, understanding the depth of their feelings, makes it possible to quickly optimize their emotional state and effectively cope with setbacks and anxiety. The functioning of emotional intelligence is based on its central mechanisms and processes. They are different from those of general intelligence, i.e. emotional intelligence has potential discriminant validity in relation to general intelligence.

The processes that support the functions of emotional intelligence include a symbolic representation of emotions, self-regulation strategies for controlling emotions and the acquisition of motor skills such as vocal expression or gestures. It is still not clear how exactly these processes are related to emotional intelligence. Therefore, further research is needed on the underlying mental processes of emotional intelligence.

So, emotional intelligence is a collection of mental abilities for identifying, understanding and managing emotions. It is most often interpreted as a substructure of social intelligence, but it differs from the latter in that it includes deep emotions that are significant for personal growth.

Emotional intelligence as a mental ability is also part of a broader group of personality traits. It meets the traditional criteria of intelligence –emotional intelligence is operationalized as intellectual ability.Representing a unitary mental ability, it correlates with other types of intelligence; emotional intelligence is age-dependent, increasing between early adolescence and early adulthood. The functioning of emotional intelligence is based on the following mechanisms: emotionality, emotion control, central mechanisms. The processes on which emotional intelligence is based require further research.