The moody sulkiness that erupts into warmth and affection. The impressive academic accomplishment that precedes an idiotic, immature decision.
(How often have you had this conversation:
YOU: What on earth were you thinking?
TEEN: That’s just it. I wasn’t thinking.)
Of course, teenagers often baffle themselves. And according to recent research, some of that confusion may result from difficulty understanding their own emotions.
Emotion Differentiation
Researchers who study emotions often focus on our ability to distinguish among them.
For instance: when I see a picture of rotting food, I might be disgusted and upset. However, I’m not angry or scared.
Researchers call this ability “emotion differentiation.” Unsurprisingly, individuals who succeed at emotion differentiation see other kinds of success. They’re good at coping with difficult emotional situations. They’re less likely to rely on alcohol to get through tough times.
To understand adolescent emotion, we might ask: how good are teens at emotion differentiation?
Are they better at it than children? Than adults? In other words, how does this capacity develop over time?
He and his colleagues showed people (age range 5 to 24) pictures, and asked them to rate their emotional responses to them. Focusing on negative emotions, Nook asked participants how “angry, upset, sad, disgusted, and scared” each picture made them.
For example: if a participant gave the highest rating to all five emotions, that response pattern showed little emotional differentiation. All five emotions were experienced equally.
If, however, he gave a high rating to “scared,” a medium rating to “disgusted,” and a low rating to the other three, that pattern showed high emotional differentiation.
What did they find?
Children and adults distinguish among emotions better than adolescents do.
That is: children and adults can say “I’m feeling upset, but not scared.” Adolescents, however, have a harder time drawing those distinctions. Their negative emotions swirl together in a chaotic muddle.
Adolescent Emotion: Hidden Strength
But why is this so?
Nook & Co. investigated several competing hypotheses. Their answer reveals a hidden strength in adolescent emotion processing.
It turns out that children are good at distinguishing among emotions because they don’t really understand it’s possible to experience more than one emotion at a time.
In other words: young children report that they’re feeling disgusted but not sad because they don’t recognize it’s possible to feel both disgusted and sad.
Adolescents, however, DO recognize the possibility of feeling multiple emotions. And yet, because this understanding arrives freshly with adolescence, teens don’t yet have much practice differentiating among them.
As Nook and colleagues write:
children have high emotion differentiation because they experience emotions one at a time, whereas adults have high emotion differentiation potentially because of increased ability to specifically identify co-experienced emotions.
Adolescents, however, fall between these two stools. They do recognize the possibility of experience multiple emotions, but don’t yet have enough practice at sorting out which is which.
Teaching Implications
As so often happens, this research guides us in two directions. Teachers should both think this way and do this thing.
Think this way. With this clearer understanding of adolescent emotion, we can clear our own heads when we cross paths with a teen in an emotional tasmanian-devil vortex.
Rather than say to ourselves “why is this 17-year-old melting down like a child?,” we can say “Aha! He’s aware that he’s experiencing multiple emotions, but he’s not sure which is which. That confusion has led to an atypical emotional outburst.”
This simple understanding may help us stay calm despite adolescent angst.
Do this thing. Adolescents know that they’re feeling many things, but they don’t yet have much experience naming them simultaneously. We can help them.
In the emotional moment itself, we can ask guiding questions and offer potential labels. As always, teacherly guidance can show teens the way in difficult moments.
Also, in our teaching, we can highlight moments of emotional complexity. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, does Janie admire Jody Starks, or hate him? Fear him, or pity him? Perhaps, all at the same time?
In this way, the curriculum that we teach can help adolescents develop emotion differentiation.
Two final notes.
First: we’ve written about work from Leah Somerville’s lab before. If you want to know more about adolescence, look here or here.
Second: one of the co-authors of this study is Stephanie Sasse, one-time editor of this blog. Congratulations!
The National Network of State Teachers of the Year has released a report on teaching emotional intelligence.
Overall, they find research in this field persuasive. That is, these award-winning teachers think it likely that social/emotional intelligence can be taught, and does benefit students in a number of ways.
At the same time–and for obvious reasons–they think more professional development and more funding are important. And, they worry about including these measures in teacher evaluations.
If your school is considering these questions, this report might be a helpful place to start.
If people spend lots of time pretending to beat up and shoot pretend people, will this experience reduce their empathy for human suffering? Will it make them more likely to really beat up and shoot real people?
We might get different answers to this question depending on the variables we decide to measure, and the tools we use to measure them.
In this study, researchers found 15 people who often played violent video games–typically “first person shooter” games involving automatic weapons–and 15 who had never played them.
These participants looked at sketches: some showed people by themselves while others depicted people in pairs. Half of the pictures showed mundane activities–two men carrying a cabinet–while the other half showed violent activities–one man forcibly holding another man’s head underwater.
As participants looked at these pictures, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural responses.
The researchers reasoned as follows: if violent video games impair players’ empathy, these scans should reveal differences in brain networks associated with empathy. That is: gamers and non-gamers would respond similarly to the men carrying the cabinet, but the gamers would not respond with as much empathy as the non-gamers to the sight of human suffering. After all, in this hypothesis, the gamers would have been desensitized to human pain, and so would not have as strong an empathetic response.
How much difference did they find?
One Conclusion, and One More
No difference. Gamers and non-gamers were equally empathetic–and non-empathetic–when they looked at these images.
So: when these researchers answer this version of this question using these tools, they get this answer.
However: when these researchers answer this version of the question using metanalysis, they get a radically different answer:
The evidence strongly suggests that exposure to violent video games is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, and aggressive affect and for decreased empathy and prosocial behavior.
The Takeaway
I hope this entry does NOT persuade you that video games do, or don’t, reduce empathy.
I hope, instead, to persuade you that it’s hard to answer that question once and for all. We have many ways to ask, and many tools with which to answer, such a question. Only by asking (and asking and asking), and then by looking for converging answers, can we start to move towards a conclusion.
In fact, many aspects of our cognition are inherently emotional. When one’s emotional well-being suffers, so does her cognition. Because of the inseparable nature of emotion and cognition, the way we feel has a profound effect on our learning.
And yet, the emotional processing inherent in cognition is not always considered in pedagogical practices. What is measured is what is emphasized, and when it comes to traditional schooling, the thing getting emphasized is content knowledge. We place so much weight on the assessment of the content knowledge that we gloss over how it may be best received by students.
If instructors were also encouraged to tailor the delivery of the course material, they could enlist students’ emotional processing to ultimately better enable students to engage with, learn, and understand that same content.
What Gets Measured Is What Gets Emphasized
Traditional pedagogy largely takes on a vacuum-sealed, content-centric approach to learning. Content is passively transmitted to the students to then be assessed, most often via a written test. Derived largely from these tests are letter grades, GPA, class rank, overall school performance, etc. What gets measured is what gets emphasized, and the thing that’s measured is content knowledge.
While it may seem counterintuitive, focusing so narrowly on the content knowledge that we want students to learn prevents them from best learning it. One study, for example, revealed that students of teachers who are told to ensure that their students perform well on a given exam tend to fare more poorly than students of teachers who are told to facilitate student learning (Flink, Boggiano, & Barrett, 1990; Flink et al., 1992, as cited in Diamond, 2010).
Let’s take a step back and look at what the science says about the way we are wired. We are emotional beings. By disregarding our emotional processing, we fundamentally disregard the way in which we store and access information.
Emotions and School Performance
Studies relating the social and emotional well-being of students to their academic performance underscore the interrelationship of the two.
If students’ emotional well-being is not sound, their cognitively capabilities–and thus academic performance–are necessarily hindered. For this reason, ensuring student social and emotional well-being can improve academic outcomes.
Students’ motivation and interest in school, for example, can be predicted by the positive support they receive from peers, teachers, and parents (Wentzel, 1998). Relatedly, teachers’ expectations of student achievement, which has an emotional component, affect student motivation, academic self-perceptions, and academic performance (Jussim & Harber, 2005).
This enhanced engagement may be due, at least in part, to the fact that when teachers create a positive social environment, students feel safe to explore and take risks in their learning, without the fear of failure (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). At the same time, stress can greatly hamper our thinking and cognition (Diamond, 2010).
Let us not lose the view of the forest from among the trees. We want students to perform well on assessments, so we focus on the content. However, students perform better when their social and emotional processing are engaged throughout the learning process. This improvement has even been found to be true for performance on standardized tests (Weissberg, et al., 2008), on which many high-level decisions are based.
Emotion and Executive Function
What may help to explain this improved school performance is the role emotion plays in cognition–in particular, our executive function (EF).
EF includes fundamental capacities like working memory, inhibitory control, and attentional control, which are building blocks for other skills and capacities, like cognitive flexibility, creative problem-solving, critical thinking, etc. (Diamond, 2010). All of these, I think we can agree, are important underlying skills to possess for academic (and professional) success.
(For a broader review of EF, see this post by my fellow blogger, Lindsay Clements.)
In a simple, though somewhat mean-spirited study, Baumeister, Twenge, and Nuss (2002) compared cognitive assessments of two groups of people: one group was told by the researchers that they would have close relationships throughout their lives, the other group was told that they would likely end up alone in life.
The groups showed no difference on assessments of simple memorization tasks. They did, however, show differences on complex cognitive tasks that require use of EF; unsurprisingly, the group told that they were likely to end up alone fared worse. This group also performed more poorly on assessments of IQ and on a widely used measure of academic achievement: the GRE.
(Don’t worry; the researchers let the participants in on the secret at the end of the study, and reassured them they wouldn’t die alone…)
A neuroscience study also confirmed the notion of hindered cognition due to social exclusion. In this study, people who experienced feelings of social exclusion showed less brain activity in certain regions when required to do difficult math problems (Campbell, et al., 2006). The researchers suggest specifically that social exclusion interferes with an individual’s ability to focus their attention, which then affects other aspects of cognition.
You’re Being So Emotional
Despite what any economist may try to tell you, we are not rational beings. Emotional processing is necessarily and inextricably woven throughout many aspects of cognition.
Conventional wisdom may say that human decision-making void of emotion is rational. This is probably due to the fact that we can easily find examples of emotions driving us to irrationality, e.g., some individuals fear flying over driving, despite flying being statistically safer.
It also turns out that human decision-making void of emotion can also become quite irrational. When posed with two alternative dates for an appointment, an individual with an injured ventromedial prefrontal cortex–a region of the brain associated with emotions and decision-making–took close to 30 minutes to weigh out the pros and cons of each date, considering anything one could reasonably think about that might impede his ability to make the appointment on either day (Damasio, 2006).
According to Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007), cognition, especially the aspects of cognition that we ask of students in school, “namely learning, attention, memory, decision making, and social functioning, are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion.”
Emotional processing is necessary for students to be able to transfer that which is learned in the classroom to the outside world; simply having the knowledge does not necessarily mean that students will take advantage of it in different contexts. They suggest that emotional processing provides a “rudder to guide judgement and action” (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007).
Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) end their piece with the following lines:
When we educators fail to appreciate the importance of students’ emotions, we fail to appreciate a critical force in students’ learning. One could argue, in fact, that we fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all.
The Delivery of the Content Matters
Learning is an inherently emotional process. Our emotional well-being affects our ability to learn; when we are not stressed, nor feeling anxious, we are best able to engage with material. Though what’s more, our emotions can be leveraged in the learning process; when we are excited about something, we will be able to push ourselves to learn it better.
To create this kind of beneficial emotional environment, schools might need to rethink policies. They might also adopt new pedagogies that emphasize emotional involvement–for example, inquiry-based learning.
A constructivist approach, inquiry-based learning motivates and engages students by encouraging them to grapple with concepts, often with hands-on activities (Minner, Levy & Century, 2010). Unlike traditional, passive pedagogies, it makes learning active and emotionally salient.
Of the many findings from their meta-analysis of inquiry-based science learning, Minner, Levy and Century (2010) suggest that teaching techniques where students are actively engaged in their learning process through investigations are more likely to increase conceptual understanding than are students in passive learning environments.
The researchers also cite a study which found that students in active learning environments better retained their conceptual understanding over a longer period of time.
While I give inquiry-based learning only a cursory mention, I do so to emphasize that pedagogies can create engaging, real-world activities that encourage students to grapple with concepts, and make them emotionally engaging for students.
Conclusion
Teachers who are most concerned with student performance tend to neglect student emotion, which, ironically, leads to lower levels of student achievement. The same could be said at the systemic level: we have tried to quantify and assess what we believe to be student learning, and in doing so, we have overlooked the fact that learning is a complex, personal process and is necessarily consumed by our emotional processing.
Armed with this information, we can begin to design learning experiences to meet the social and emotional needs of students. It just so happens that there are pedagogies which lend themselves to do just that. In any classroom setting, creating an environment that incorporates students’ social and emotional learning, and which has students emotionally engrossed, will better enable them to engage with, grapple with, and ultimately better understand the content material which we hold so near and dear to our hearts.
Continue Reading
Here is a link to a Learning and the Brain blog post reviewing Immordino-Yang’s book: Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience.
For more on social-emotional learning, visit the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) website here.
References
Baumeister, R. F., Twenge, J. M., & Nuss, C. K. (2002). Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 817. [link]
Campbell, W. K., Krusemark, E. A., Dyckman, K. A., Brunell, A. B., McDowell, J. E., Twenge, J. M., & Clementz, B. A. (2006). A magnetoencephalography investigation of neural correlates for social exclusion and self-control. Social Neuroscience, 1(2), 124-134. [link]
Damasio, A. R. (2006). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York, New York: Avon Books.
Diamond, A. (2010). The evidence base for improving school outcomes by addressing the whole child and by addressing skills and attitudes, not just content. Early Education and Development, 21(5), 780-793. [link]
Immordino‐Yang, M. H., & Damasio, A. (2007). We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), 3-10. [link]
Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The prosocial classroom: Teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes. Review of Educational Research, 79(1), 491-525. [link]
Jussim, L., & Harber, K. D. (2005). Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(2), 131-155. [link]
Minner, D. D., Levy, A. J., & Century, J. (2010). Inquiry‐based science instruction—what is it and does it matter? Results from a research synthesis years 1984 to 2002. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(4), 474-496. [link]
Weissberg, R. P., Durlak, J. A., Taylor, R. D., Dynmicki, A. B., & O’Brien, M. U. (2008). Promoting social and emotional learning enhances school success: Implications of a meta-analysis. Unpublished manuscript.
Wentzel, K. R. (1998). Social relationships and motivation in middle school: The role of parents, teachers, and peers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90(2), 202. [link]
Scientific American Mind has entitled this brief piece “Too Much Emotional Intelligence is a Bad Thing.”
Given the content of the article — and common sense — a more accurate title would be “In very particular circumstances, the ability to read others’ emotions well might raise cortisol levels for some people while they speak in public.”
That alternate title isn’t as clickable…but, it also doesn’t substantially misstate the point of the research it summarizes.
The Larger Point
Even reputable magazines can overstate researchers’ conclusions — especially in headlines. For this reason, we should always look closely at the particulars of any research paradigm before we make decisions about relying on an article.
For example: if I wanted readers to click on a headline, I might summarize Ina Dobler’s study this way:
“Asking Students to Remember Causes Them to Forget!”
Believe it or not, “retrieval-induced forgetting” is a thing, and — in particular circumstances — might be a problem in classrooms.
(I wrote about retrieval-induced forgetting last year; you can read that article here.)
However, as you know if you’ve attended recent LaTB conferences; or read Scott’s or Ian’s entries on this blog; or read make it stick by Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel; or How We Learn by Benedict Carey, asking students to generate answers to questions is most often a highly beneficial way to help them consolidate memories.
In other words, my headline — by sloppily overgeneralizing Dobler’s conclusions — could badly mislead casual readers.
To quote a recent Scientific American headline: “Overreliance on Magazine Headlines is a Bad Thing…”
The moody sulkiness that erupts into warmth and affection. The impressive academic accomplishment that precedes an idiotic, immature decision.
