Emotions and learning

The affective sciences in the service of Education in Schools

By David Sander, Director of Centre Interfacultaire en Sciences Affectives (CISA), Mai 2016

Photograph: © CISA - Sophie Jarlier

Joy, surprise, interest, fear, anger, sadness, shame, pride, jealousy, frustration, relief, hope, boredom, confusion, admiration, or even wonder: emotions are omnipresent in school activities, for students and teachers.

There is, however, a paradox: while actors of the school system can only agree on the evident presence of varied and often intense emotions, in the classroom as well as in other aspects of school, they are only rarely formally considered in programs targeting, for example, an increase in the quality of learning.

This paradox is even more striking considering laboratory researches in the field of the affective sciences as well as intervention programs on emotions in schools suggest that activities focusing on emotions and on emotional skills can have a favorable effect, directly or indirectly, on well-being and learning (for a review, see Brackett et al., 2011; Cuisinier, Tornare, et Pons, 2015; Durlak et al., 2011; Mazzietti & Sander, 2015; Pekrun & Linnenbrick-Garcia, 2014; Theurel & Gentaz, 2015).

The affective sciences: the interdisciplinary study of emotions

The affective sciences corresponds to an academic research field that was developed in an integrated way since the beginning of the 2000’s, its objective is to study emotions and other affective phenomena (e.g., mood, motivations, and preferences) in an interdisciplinary manner thanks to the contributions of various disciplines, experimental or not, that unite on a same object of study: the affective processes. Thus, multiple academic disciplines come together to understand emotions (see Sander, 2015; Sander & Scherer, 2009).

Psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to reveal the functional architecture of emotions as well as the cerebral networks involved. Psychiatry and clinical psychology are interested by the theories of emotion to study their role in numerous clinical conditions such as depression, anxiety, or developmental disorders, in autism for example. Research in economy has for a long time been a bastion of the models based on formal logic. Yet, researches in economy have received Nobel prizes on their theories of affective biases in decision-making and judgment.

More and more philosophers analyze emotional concepts and the coherence of contemporary theories of emotion. Additionally, other disciplines are also concerned: law researchers are interested in emotions such as shame and guilt, as well as other emotional determinants of the feeling of justice. Political scientists are examining the emotional reasons that lead to expressing a certain opinion or a certain vote. Historians and anthropologists are investigating whether emotions are universal, and to what extent they have a past as well as vary in function of culture.

The question of emotions in fictional works, in which one is interested in the authors, characters or readers’ emotions, is more and more studied in literature. Computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers are trying to create systems capable of recognizing and expressing emotions. However, we have now reached one of the limits of our possibilities: making robots feel natural emotions (see Chapter 1 in Sander, 2015).

What is an emotion?

A literature analysis conducted by the author (Sander, 2016) has proposed that a consensus seems to be emerging to define what is an emotion. This consensus considers at least four key criteria.

(i) Emotions are phenomena with multiple components:

(1) the cognitive evaluation (e.g., interpreting a sentence as a compliment),
(2) the expression (e.g., smiling),
(3) the peripheral response (e.g., an increase of one’s heart rate),
(4) the action tendency (e.g., wanting to approach the person who compliments us), and
(5) the subjective feeling (e.g., feeling joy).

(ii) Emotions are a two-step process involving a trigger mechanism that produces a response. Typically, the cognitive evaluation component (appraisal) is considered to be responsible for triggering, while the other components are considered to constitute the response.

(iii) Emotions are triggered by relevant objects: All traditions of research on emotions underline the link between emotions and relevance (also known as significance or importance in a larger sense) of the triggering situation.

(iv) Emotions have a brief duration in comparison to other affective phenomena; they are typically considered to be brief episodes, in contrast to moods, preferences, affective styles, and emotional dispositions.

It thus seems that a consensual definition can be proposed: An emotion is a rapid process, focusing on an event and consists of two steps:

(1) a trigger mechanism based on the relevance of the event that shapes

(2) a response composed of multiple components (action tendencies, the reactions of the autonomic nervous system, expression, and subjective feeling).

The questions guiding conceptual and empirical studies on emotions in the affective sciences have been numerous, in particular: How are our emotions triggered? How are they expressed? How can we measure them? How can we control them? What are their functions? To what extent do other animals share them? Do they have innate dimensions? Are they determined by culture and personality? How do they develop throughout our lives? Can they be unconscious? How are they represented in the brain and in the rest of the body? Do they oppose reason? Do they reflect our values? Do they guide attention, memory, and decision-making? Are they a motor of action? Are they the foundation of moral judgment? How do we characterize emotional disorders and their links to psychopathologies such as depression, anxiety, or autism?

Emotions at school

As mentioned above, the academic and relational stakes and interests are so important at school that the actors of the school system can only agree on the evident presence of diverse, sometimes intense, emotions in the classroom as well as in other dimensions of school. Even if sometimes the presence of emotions at school can interfere with learning and teaching (e.g., decreased concentration during learning), the scientific arguments that suggest we would gain from taking into consideration emotions at school to facilitate learning are of at least four types.

First of all, there is now an accumulation of results that indicate that emotions can play a positive role in favoring learning. Indeed, emotions have the potential to facilitate processes that allow the acquisition (e.g., perception and attention), storing (e.g., episodic memory and implicit learning), and use (e.g., decision-making and reasoning) of knowledge (see LaBar & Cabeza, 2006; Lerner et al., 2015; Pool et al., 2016). Even if these effects depend on many contextual factors, as well as on the nature of the emotion and its intensity, the potential positive effects appear to be sufficiently promising to encourage the use of emotions with the aim of facilitating learning. These results are coherent with studies showing an often positive role of emotions in education (see Cuisinier, Tornare, et Pons, 2015; Pekrun & Linnenbrick-Garcia, 2014).

Additionally, emotions such as interest, confusion, surprise, or admiration are closely associated with knowledge and learning. This is why they are called epistemic emotions or “knowledge emotions” (see Morton, 2010; Silvia, 2010). For example, the emotion of “interest” plays a key role in the exploration of novelty, learning, acquisition of knowledge, and development of expertise in numerous areas (Silvia, 2006). Results suggest that the events triggering interest are those that are evaluated as novel and complex, but comprehensible (Silvia, 2006). The recognition of facial expressions of interest by children would help them focus their attention on what is interesting (Clément & Dukes, 2012). A better knowledge of these epistemic emotions could reveal to be precious for the organization and application of school curricula.

Emotion at school has more traditionally been considered in relation to the school climate and, in general, to health, well-being, and the students’ satisfaction (as well as for the other actors of the school system). For example, issues of school anxiety, dangerous or at risk behaviors, or even harassment – as well as their prevention – are typically linked to students’ emotional reactions and the questions of emotion regulation (e.g., Patton et al., 2006). It should be noted that if an increase of well-being of the students at school is a prioritized goal as such, a positive distal effect on learning is conceivable considering the positive effects suggested between the students’ well-being and their academic performance (Gutman & Vorhaus, 2012).

Finally, a field of research has strongly been developed in the last few years concerning the study of emotional skills at school. The notion of “emotional skills” is the object of many researches and tests, the goal being to measure these emotional skills, and understand how they develop. Among the most studied, we can cite the following:

(1) understanding emotions, their causes and consequences;
(2) the recognition of one’s own emotions, including the ability to label them;
(3) the recognition of emotions in another, sometimes associated with empathic skills;
(4) the ability to have the appropriate emotions for a given situation, in terms of quality and intensity;
(5) learning the emotional value of new situations;
(6) the regulation of one’s own emotions;
(7) the management of another’s emotions, for example in group.

Even if certain authors consider emotional skills to be traits of temper or personality, other authors have an approach that considers each skill as susceptible to evolve; thus training programs, in which their goal is to develop emotional skills, are created (see e.g., Sprung et al., 2015). For example, in education, certain researches have given themselves the goal of evaluating the impact of education programs of emotional skills on the well-being of students and their academic performance (see e.g., Brackett et al., 2011; Theurel & Gentaz, 2015). For example, the RULER program developed at Yale University has made it possible to obtain encouraging results concerning the social and emotional climate in the classroom (Rivers et al., 2013) and academic performance (Brackett et al., 2012).

Consequently, for both research questions and in the aim of pedagogical development, it seems essential to study, in an interdisciplinary manner, emotions at school by asking research questions, such as: In what context are they triggered? How are they expressed in a school environment? How do they modulate the well-being of the actors of the school system? What are their effects on the students’ learning? How can they favor students’ performance? How can we develop the students’ emotional skills? How do emotions and their links to learning vary in function of the children’s age and their learning difficulties? How do we develop a pedagogy that integrates the study of emotions in students?

A few examples of internet resoures regarding the study of emotions and emotional skills at school:

Word Economic Forum - New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning Through Technology :
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_New_Vision_for_Education.pdf

Programme RULER au Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence :
http://ei.yale.edu/evidence

Outils pédagogiques de la fondation Graines de Paix :
http://www.graines-de-paix.org/fr/nos_programmes_thematiques/programme_education_concepts_et_outils_pedagogiques

Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) :
http://www.casel.org

PATH education :
http://www.pathseducation.com

Programme Vers le Pacifique :
http://institutpacifique.com/recherche/objectifs/evaluation-des-impacts-et-de-la-mise-e-oeuvre-de-la-2e-version-du-programme-vers-le-pacifique-au-prescolaire-5-ans-et-primaire-2001-2005/

Resourceful Adolescent Program :
http://www.rap.qut.edu.au

Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab :
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~melias/

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