Emotions Affect Learning
Your students may not remember what you taught them, but they will remember how you made them feel.
Anonymous
Why do emotions affect learning? Why are certain events hard to get out of your head? Because the events have an emotional impact or component to them. Emotion highlights the effect of the experience and makes it more likely to be consolidated in memory.
Emotions get our attention and emotionally arousing events are better remembered than neutral events, which effects learning. Emotionally charged activities and events are the best processed stimuli and persist much longer in our memories while being recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories.
Emotions occur in response to events and keep our brains focused on critical information. Emotions motivate us to develop behaviors to gain what we desire and avoid what we fear.
An event’s biological relevance makes it important, according to John Ratey. In his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain , Ratey writes that “we remember painful, averse events so that we can avoid repeating them; we remember happy, advantageous experiences because they represent our best biological fit (such as the best sources of food and sex). In other words, emotional events, whether good or bad, stay with us: the stronger the emotion, the longer lasting the memory.”
The Emotional Brain is comprised mainly of the Limbic System and is involved in emotion, motivation, and memory. It lies near the center of the brain and is about the size of a walnut and determines a person’s emotional tone by providing a filter through which you interpret the events of the day. It contains two major areas associated with memory, the amygdala and hippocampus.
The amygdala, the Greek word for almond, intensifies a memory by adding an emotional component to it. It has been described as the intensity button, the alarm system button, the panic button, the anger button, and the fight-or-flight button of the brain. The amygdala coordinates your emotional responses responding to rage, fear, pleasure, and past experiences of rage, fear, and pleasure. It focuses our attention on emotional events in our world.
According to Ratey, the amygdala mediates the effects on many types of learning and emotional arousal by facilitating attention to important details of an experience. It supervises not only the formation of emotional experiences but also the memory of emotional experiences.
If the amygdala is the intense button, the hippocampus is the Grand Central Station of Memory. The hippocampus, located behind the amygdala near the center of the brain and in each hemisphere, is involved in converting short-term memories into longer-term memories and spatial navigation. The hippocampus works with the amygdala whereby strong emotions improve the encoding process of hippocampus neurons and make it easier to retrieve the experience. Memory wise, this is useful because it allows a person to more easily remember events that were “emotionally stimulating.”
Brain break.
1. What type of events are the best processed stimulus and persist much longer in our memories
2. What brain region intensifies a memory by adding an emotional component to it?
3. What brain region is the Grand Central Station of memory?
Answers: 1. Emotionally charged activities and events; 2. Amygdala; 3. Hippocampus
As you look at the picture above, you immediately recall the event and easily remember the emotion you felt on that September day as you watched the scenes caused by the terrorists. Now try to recall the factual details of the event such as the airports from where the planes departed from.
You probably remember more about the feelings you felt on September 11, 2001 than you do the exact details of the attack.
The following scenarios will advance my point.
1. Of all of the memories you have as a student, what is one of your favorite ones? Is it something a teacher or administrator said or did that boasted your motivation and self-dignity?
Of all of the memories you have as a student, what is one of your worst ones? Is it something that a teacher or school administrator said or did that lessened your motivation and self-dignity?
As you reflect upon both your positive and negative memories of school, what can you learn from both and how can these memories serve as a guide to what you are doing with your students today?
2. Recall the most remarkable teacher you ever had. Now picture the teacher’s face. Now recall how he or she made you feel.
3. Think of a teacher you liked and a teacher you did not like when you were a student and describe them in several words. Just as you have words to describe your teachers, your students have words to describe you. What words would you hope your students would use to describe you? What words would they actually use to describe you based on your actions of the past month? How close are the two scenarios? The above example can be used to describe a husband & wife or a parent & child relationship.
All of the above examples illustrate my favorite education motto: Brains are like hearts; they go where they are appreciated.
The following is an example you can use in a classroom. Divide the class in half and ask group one to count the words that have diagonal lines in them and the words that do not.
Instruct group two to think about the meaning of each word and rate the words on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how much they like the word.
Car Purple Jet
Red Slowly Lift
Orange Sea Frown
One Mean Short
The result. The group that processes the meaning of the words always remembers two to three times as many words as the group that looked at the architecture of the individual letters. The more meaning something has, the more memorable it becomes. No kidding!
John Medina in his book Brain Rules uses the above example to explain that the more elaborately we encode information for learning, the stronger the memory. He writes that “when encoding is elaborate and deep, the memory that forms is much more robust than when encoding is partial and cursory. We remember things much better the more elaborately we encode what we encounter, especially if we can personalize it. The trick is to present information in a compelling fashion so that the audience does this on their own, spontaneously engaging in deep and elaborate encoding.”
Odd! Making something more elaborate means making it more complicated, which should be more taxing to a memory system, and more complex means greater learning.
Brains are like hearts, they go where they are appreciated.
Throughout the years, Robert Brooks, on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, has advocated the need to incorporate in our schools skills associated with emotional and social intelligences. Brooks argues that this “should not occur in a separate curriculum but as a common occurrence in the classroom and does not in any way detract from teaching academic subjects.”
Brooks states that, “The study and application of science and the study and application of effective interpersonal skills are not mutually exclusive. Innovative leaders at Harvard Medical School, MIT, and other renowned institutions have recognized the importance of focusing part of the curriculum on enhancing people skills. People skills are necessary in all facets of one’s life regardless of one’s career responsibilities.”
In an article published by Mind, Brain, and Education (Dana Foundation, 2007) titled We Feel, Therefore We Learn, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang & Antonio Damasio write “Emotions allows us to use our knowledge in ways that will be culturally appropriate and useful both in school and outside school. Emotions are not add-ons that interfere with cognition. Instead, they are functional elements of why thinking and learning happen. Emotions involve the self and the body…and therefore so should schools.”
Context is more important than the content. One must make the context meaningful for the content to be remembered and learned.
Finally, a story about a little girl and Jonas the Whale. A little girl was talking to her teacher about whales. The teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to shallow a human because even through it is a very large mammal, its throat is very small.
The little girl innocently said, “You know in the Bible it says Jonas was swallowed by a whale. The teacher, not being empathic at all, became angry and said to the girl, “Did you hear what I said, it is physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human. Why are you disagreeing with me?’
The little girl was totally taken back and said, “Oh, oh, okay.” But then the little girl happened to add, “When I get to heaven, I am really going to ask Jonas about this.”
The teacher, becoming even more angry and incensed said, “Oh yeah, what if Jonas went to hell?” The little girl said, “Then you have to ask him.”
In summary, remember, there is no Mr. Spock. Emotions and memory involve the amygdala and the hippocampus. Emotional events produce vivid memories and emotional arousal is good for long-term storage of details of an activity or event. The amygdala is involved in memory during intense situations either positive or negative while memories are stored in the adjoining hippocampus.