The human emotional system is a sophisticated and widely spread system that plays a crucial role in shaping fundamental personality traits from an early age. Interestingly, it is relatively resistant to change. More neural connections extend from the brain’s emotional center to the logical and rational centers than vice versa. As a result, emotions often have a greater influence on behavior than the logical and rational processes of the brain.
In his book, The High-Conflict Couple, Dr. Alan E. Fruzzetti explains that our emotional system consists of various components that may go unnoticed. Similar to the physical and social aspects of our surroundings, there are ongoing emotional events within us, including memories, images, thoughts, and sensations.
Our emotions are influenced by biological and biochemical processes in the brain, as well as our own recognition and labeling of emotions as they arise. Additionally, how others respond to us—whether they validate or invalidate our emotional experiences—shapes the direction and intensity of our emotions.
When our emotional arousal is very high, our ability to take a balanced or long-term view suffers, and our thinking and reasoning abilities are similarly overwhelmed. Consequently, we say and do things that reflect being overwhelmed, we become defensive, or we simply do not describe the heartfelt desires and emotions that lie beneath our negative arousal.
– The High-Conflict Couple, Dr. Alan E. Fruzzetti
A quick primer on emotions
The Impact of Emotions on Learning
Although reason has the capacity to override emotions, it often fails to alter our genuine emotional responses towards something. Emotions have the ability to bypass logical processing and conscious deliberation, enabling rapid reactions based on instinctive generalizations of information. This bypass mechanism can sometimes result in irrational fears and ineffective behavior.
Emotion, like color, exists along a continuum, with a wide range of gradations. We can easily identify many discrete emotions through their standard facial and auditory expressions, but the intensity and meaning of the emotion will vary among people and situations.
– How Emotions Affect Learning
The Relationship Between Emotions and the Body
The emotional system is primarily located in the brain, endocrine system, and immune system, functioning as an interconnected biochemical system that also impacts various organs such as the heart, lungs, and skin. Emotions serve as the cohesive force that integrates the body and brain. This integration is facilitated by peptide molecules, which physically manifest this process and transmit information throughout the body.
Peptides travel across neural networks, the circulatory system, and air passages, influencing the decisions we make as we navigate emotionally charged situations involving approach and retreat behaviors. Essentially, the levels of these molecules in the body and brain determine the allocation of our emotional energy—what we do, when we do it, and how much energy we expend.
Two examples of peptide molecules that can affect student behavior in the classroom are cortisol and endorphins. When faced with an inability to fend off perceived danger, the adrenal glands release cortisol—a versatile wonder drug—triggering defensive responses such as fight, flight, or freeze.
Despite having evolved thousands of years ago, the stress response has not effectively adapted to distinguish between the types of threats present in the modern world compared to the prehistoric era. It struggles to differentiate between physical and emotional dangers. Consequently, many of these behaviors, as contemporary stress typically arises from emotional issues, often prove to be maladaptive.
Classroom Applications
Based on research into emotions, a few general themes emerge for application to the classroom. The following are quoted directly from the article linked above.
Emotions Simply Exist
We don’t learn them in the same way we learn telephone numbers, and we can’t easily change them. But we should not ignore them. Students can learn how and when to use rational processes to override their emotions, or to hold them in check. We should seek to develop forms of self-control among students and staff that encourage nonjudgmental, non disruptive (and perhaps even inefficient) venting of emotion that generally must occur before reason can take over. We all can recall past incidents that still anger us because we were not allowed to freely express our feelings before a decision was imposed on us.
Integrating emotional expression in classroom life is not difficult. Try drawing a class into a tension releasing circle (after a playground fight, for example) and playing a game of circle tag before talking out the problem. Once the students’ collective limbic systems have had their say, rational cortical processes can settle the issue. If that doesn’t work, sing a song. (As British playwright William Congreve suggested.
Music hath charms to soothe a savage beast.
In other words, when trying to solve a problem, continue the dialogue with continuous emotional input.
Focus on Metacognitive Activities
Most students already know quite a bit about the complexity of emotions and the ways they and others experience them (Saami and Harris 1991), although they may not be able to articulate what they know. Schools should focus more on metacognitive activities that encourage students to talk about their emotions, listen to their classmates’ feelings, and think about the motivations of people who enter their curricular world.
For example, the simple use of why in a question turns the discussion away from bare facts and toward motivations and emotions. “Why did the pioneers settle where the two rivers came together” is a much more emotionally loaded question than, “Where did the pioneers settle?”
Emphasize Social Interaction
Activities that emphasize social interaction and that engage the entire body tend to provide the most emotional support. Games, discussions, field trips, interactive projects, cooperative learning, physical education, and the arts are examples.
Although we’ve long known that such activities enhance student learning, we tend to think of them as special rewards, and so withdraw them when students misbehave, or when budgets are tight, eliminate them altogether.
Memories are Contextual
School activities that draw out emotions – simulations, role playing, and cooperative projects, for example – may provide important contextual memory prompts that will help students recall the information during closely related events in daily life. This is why we tend to practice fire drills in an unannounced, emotionally charged setting: in the event of a real fire, students will have to perform in that kind of setting.
Stressful School Environments are Counterproductive
Emotionally stressful school environments are counterproductive because they can reduce students’ ability to learn. Self-esteem and a sense of control over one’s environment are important in managing stress. Highly evaluative and authoritarian schools may promote institutional economy, efficiency, and accountability, but also heighten nonproductive stress in students and staff.
In short, we need to think of students as more than mere brain tissue and bodies. Powerful peptides convert that body and brain tissue into a vibrant life force.