Would a totally rational person be more intelligent than one who is emotional?

Intelligence may be defined as the ability to solve problems or navigate situations in a way that produces the best results, or best meets the aims of the individual. In this case, the actions are seen as a means to an end, and an intelligent action is the best means to achieving the desired ends. This means that an intelligent person is she who finds and employs the best means to her ends.
To act rationally is to act only with considerations to logic, which means asserting definite facts and analysing them to find the most effective means.
To act emotionally is to be driven by and in response to our feelings, focusing on what we want to get out of the situation through understanding of our own perspective.
Through this essay, I will defend the view that the intelligent person is both rational and emotional, as the balancing of these traits is essential to properly understanding a situation, and therefore to deciding the best means to the desired ends. This is because each quality balances out the negative results of the other.
This is particularly applicable to social intelligence and navigating interactions with others. For example, if two of your friends have had an argument and you take on the responsibility to reconcile them, you will need to act both rationally and emotionally.

In excess, rationality can cause us to become out of touch and detached from the situation, since by drawing on logic we may overlook the nuances of the situation and what we have learnt from our past experiences with these friends. This may mean that we reduce our response to the morality of our friends’ actions, and ignore what we know about them as people (such as the wider context of their personalities, and what we believe about their motivations).
Emotion is therefore necessary to ground us in the situation and remind us of our loyalties to our friends, so that we don’t just view them as elements of a problem to solve, but as complex people facing an issue that we care about. This helps us find the most compassionate and understanding means to the ends of reconciliation.

However, emotion can cause similar problems in excess. If we are overly-emotional, we may be so caught up in our own perspective of and feelings about something that we ignore the potential impact of an action on others, or immerse ourselves in the present so that we don’t consider its long-term impact. For example, if one of our friends offends us during the argument, we may feel so angry that we worsen their disagreement (creating a negative long-term impact), or forget about the feelings of our other friend regarding the original argument and become selfish.
This means that logic is necessary to find the most beneficial means to an end, and ensures our actions don’t result in unintended consequences that may harm us, or ultimately work against our desired ends. Rationality is also necessary to recognise the experiences of others, since only through logic can we predict the effect of an action on others.

However, some might argue that although we need to be both rational and emotional, those who are overly-rational are more intelligent than those who are overly-emotional, suggesting that intelligence is in fact based in rationality. They might use my example to say that a truly rational person would take their loyalties to their friends into account when making a judgement, which would allow them to make a compassionate decision without involving their emotions within the situation.
Despite this, I would still argue that this asserts the necessity of emotion, since we can only experience a sense of loyalty if we value our friends and feel grateful to them, which requires emotion. I believe that we can only understand the world around us through its relation to ourselves– we predict how others will react to our decisions based on our beliefs about that person, or through our own feelings about our decision. This means we can only understand something’s effect on others by relating it to our own experiences, making it impossible to act compassionately without taking our own emotions into account. Without a good understanding of our emotions, we cannot make an effective judgement about our effect on others, and so cannot find the best means to our desired ends.