Emotional competence (EC) is a precursor to the development of healthy psychosocial functioning, with deficits in EC triggering a cascade of negative outcomes throughout development. Despite the importance of each component of EC (i.e., emotion reasoning, emotion stability, emotion regulation, and empathy) there are inconsistent definitions with negative downstream implications for assessment, risk identification, prevention/intervention, and monitoring treatment progress. Therefore, the current paper synthesizes a large body of research across multiple domains and reviews definitional considerations for each component to present a unifying theoretical framework of EC. This paper also reviews commonly used assessments for each component of EC to examine how questions from each assessment align with their descriptions and relate to definitions provided. Recommendations are also offered regarding which assessments result in increased accuracy and consistent measurement. Lastly, a summary of current issues in the field regarding the measurement of EC components (i.e., definitional considerations, psychometrics, cohesive measurement, normed scores and cutoffs) and recommendations for future research are provided.