Kids Are Dramatic

~Emotion and Reason: Why Education Needs Both~

Traditionally, emotion and reason are seen as polar opposites of each other. Emotionality is relegated to the realm of touchy feely love poems and diary entries, while rationality is the solid stuff of science and smart business investments. Common sense tells us emotion should be suspended when making rational decisions, that passion clouds judgment. To us, emotion and reason are distinct entities, and they do not play well together. They work in different ways, they accomplish different things, and if they do interact, they only hinder one another.

Or so we once thought.

Recently, however, research is beginning to uncover a startling finding: this dichotomy between passion and reason, between emotionality and rationality, may not be that clear cut after all. There is, as identified by many researchers, a rational component to emotional information processing, just as there is an emotional contribution to cognitive mechanisms (Pessoa, 2009; Salovey & Mayer, 1990). That is to say, not only do emotion and reason interact, they are also interdependent.

In fact, higher cognitive functioning would be impossible without both. Processes such as decision-making and social interaction require input from both the emotional and the rational side of the human psyche. Yet, when it comes to education, schools have traditionally emphasized only the rational. We heavily train our students in the core skills of reading, writing, and mathematics, while disregarding their social and emotional needs. However, we cannot afford to overlook the critical role emotion plays in academic success and healthy personal development. So let us consider, then, how emotion impacts our “rational” cognitive processes with a view toward how we can improve the education of our children.

The Role of Emotion in Cognition

What we think of as cognition—the mental processes responsible for things like attention, learning, memory, and problem solving—is not wholly independent from our feelings and instincts. A growing body of scientific evidence lends support to a whole new model of the human mind, a model emphasizing the role emotion plays in cognitive processes (Pessoa, 2009).

Perception and attention are greatly enhanced by emotion. Happy or angry faces are detected much faster in a visual search task than neutral faces (Eastwood et al., 2001), and people are much better at detecting emotionally-laden words, such as rape, than they are at detecting neutral ones (Anderson, 2005). However, patients with lesions in the amygdala, a region of the brain responsible for processing emotional reactions, do not exhibit this same improved rate of detection (Anderson & Phelps, 2001).

These findings all seem to suggest that we are more attentive to emotional stimuli. In other words, we do not divide our attention equally among all objects in our environment. Rather, our supposedly “rational” cognitive system seems to have a marked preference for emotional qualities.

Similarly, people are also better at remembering emotional events or information as opposed to neutral ones. Recall for both film clips (Cahill et al., 1996) and pictures (Bradley et al., 1992) proved to be better for emotionally arousing stimuli than for their neutral counterparts.

To use a more relevant set of examples, consider how emotionally intense experiences often seem to be burned into memory. Most people can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about major historical events, such as JFK’s assassination or September 11^th. Why? In part, because these are also extremely emotional events.

This same principle applies to personal life experiences. Events such as car crashes or weddings tend to be particularly memorable, while psychiatric conditions such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) occur precisely because patients cannot forget exceptionally intense, traumatic emotional experiences. Once again, we see that emotion greatly impacts seemingly straightforward cognitive processes. What we remember and how well we remember it are dependent, in part, on our emotional reactions.

Finally, in an interesting case study, Antonio Damasio (1994) documented the vital role emotion plays in decision-making. One of Damasio’s patients had suffered a brain injury that left him perfectly functional except that he could not experience emotion.

One day, when asked to choose between two possible dates to schedule his next appointment, the patient proceeded to list the pros and cons of each date for over half an hour, but he could not come to a decision. His inability to make such a simple choice was not due to any deficit in his ability to reason—he performed higher than average on intelligence tests and he proved his ability to rationalize the pros and cons of each date—but rather, his inability to make decisions stemmed from an emotional deficit.

Because he could not experience emotion, both dates felt the same to him. That is, if he chose the first date for the appointment, he might have to reschedule lunch with a friend. If he chose the second date, he might have to get up earlier than usual. However, rescheduling lunch did not feel any better or worse than having to get up early, and so he could not decide which option he preferred.

In this sense, we see that emotion assigns value to the different alternatives we must choose between when making a decision. Indeed, emotion is so critical to the decision-making process that a deficit in emotion renders us incapable of making any decision at all.

This body of research demonstrates that cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and decision-making are not independent from emotional processes. Rather, emotion informs cognition, such that if we want to better understand how we think, we must also consider how we feel.

What This Means for Education

The research presented above clearly indicates that emotion plays a critical role in cognition. The key issue, then, is how this research applies to the current education system. Schools emphasize a core academic curriculum that does little to address the social and emotional needs of their students. However, schools cannot expect students to master these core academic areas if they do not first teach students how to effectively manage these emotional forces.

Namely, if schools care so much about developing certain cognitive abilities (such as attention and memory and decision-making), and if emotion plays such an important role in these same areas of cognition, then why is emotion being ignored? Why are students not being educated emotionally as well as academically?

From test anxiety to the boredom of an interminable history lecture to the frustration of algebra, emotions play a central role in students’ daily classroom experiences. They greatly affect students’ ability to learn, and thus, they cannot go unacknowledged. How can educators expect students to concentrate on their work when they are too preoccupied with parents fighting at home or kids picking on them at school? Shouldn’t these emotional factors not only be taken into consideration, but also given priority?

Indeed, students primarily drop out of school not because of academic reasons, but because of emotional reasons (Marcus & Sanders-Reio, 2001). Dropouts frequently report that they do not feel safe at school, they do not fit in socially, they do not feel attached to their work, and they have not developed strong relationships with teachers. These feelings of social disconnect and isolation are more important regarding students’ willingness to continue with school than actual academic achievement. One would think we should make a serious attempt to address this extremely important issue.

Approaching the problem from a different angle, emotions can also be hugely beneficial by positively contributing to education. They serve as important motivating forces, such as the proverbial “love of learning” teachers so often strive to instill in their pupils. Schools should foster environments where students develop a sense of pride in their work and are intrinsically motivated to succeed. By focusing on these positive benefits of social and emotional learning (SEL), a number of programs have shown huge success in the past.

In a meta-analysis of 73 SEL programs, Durlak & Weissberg (2007) found significant improvements in self-confidence, self-esteem, school bonding, positive social behavior, school grades, achievement test scores, and reductions in problem behavior and drug use among the youth these programs served. Focusing specifically on academics, the programs reported a collective 12% gain in academic achievement—the equivalent of a whole letter grade.

It is extremely important to note that these are not tutoring programs. They do not help kids with math or writing. They do not touch their homework, and yet, they still produced a massive improvement in their success at school. Why? Because emotional competency is, in fact, hugely important for academic achievement. Indeed, that 12% difference can be interpreted as the price students pay when their emotional needs go unmet.

Yet, as important as this emotional competency is to healthy child development, children today are increasingly faced with a limited opportunity to acquire these all-important emotional skills. Usually, kids learn most of what they know about emotional regulation and appropriate social interaction from their parents, as the home environment is critical to teaching kids emotional literacy. However, not all kids have such a place where they can learn these skills. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those who are raised by only one parent or whose parents work multiple jobs, do not have the same opportunities to pick up important social skills.

So if not in school, and if not at home, then where will they find the help they need?

To this end, Kids Are Dramatic is staging an intervention in the local Colorado Springs school system. KAD recognizes the critical role emotion plays in the inward personal development and outward social integration of youth in our community. As such, we believe there should be more to education than merely addressing traditional academic subjects, such as reading, writing, mathematics, and the like. We believe students have immediate emotional and social needs as well, and that these needs are just as relevant to students’ overall success and personal well-being. KAD strives to address this problem by applying a wholly unique approach—that of theater. Theater promises to be a powerful tool for developing students’ emotional literacy and improving youth behavior.

So rather than suppressing or ignoring all together the role emotion plays in the very cognitive skills we seek to foster through education, perhaps it is best we take a step back and contemplate a different viewpoint. Let us consider educating our children not only academically, but emotionally as well. As the Dalai Lama once said, “It is vital that when educating our children’s brains, we do not neglect to educate their hearts.”