Positive Emotions in Education

Positive emotion is, I believe, so abundant in young children because this is such a fundamental period for broadening and building cognitive, social and physical resources.  Positive emotion accomplishes this in several ways.  First, it directly generates exploration, which in turn allows mastery.  Mastery itself produces more positive emotion, creating an upward spiral of good feeling, more mastery, and more good feeling.  Your little daughter then becomes a veritable broadening and building machine, her initially small bank account of resources growing mightily.  When experiencing negative emotion, in contrast, she is building a fortress that falls back on what she knows is safe and impregnable, at the cost of locking our expansiveness.
(Martin E.P. Seligman: Authentic Happiness: 210)

           

There is a growing body of evidence documenting the power of positive emotions to influence biological and social connections.  Science has demonstrated what every group of friends and every close-knit family knows: that one person's emotions can influence another's; laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one's spirits; that feeling and knowing that one is loved will empower a person to overcome almost any obstacle; that misery doesn’t really love even its own company.

Through both biological and social "nerve" pathways, we humans seem capable of almost automatically tuning in to what is going on with those close to us.  Long married couples often experience a retuning into one composite nerve system, even taking on similar facial features.  Parents, perhaps especially mothers, and their children can have a sixth sense of mutual awareness.   Even pets and their owners experience a melding.  Knowing the power of positive emotions can vastly improve an education situation.  In the next few posts I want to make some general remarks about the power of positive emotions in education, especially their role in creating a nurturing classroom community.  This post will discuss love and happiness.

            Love is a dynamic state of consciousness and action not simply a romantic attraction resembling a flaming meteor.  I have called love the fundamental substance of the universe.  This universal energy affects the attractions and repulsions of things, from atoms to galaxies, and these currents are mirrored in the human soul.  In human growth love is essential in many ways, of course.  Maslow points to one of them when he writes: “Not only does love perceive potentialities but it also actualizes them.  The absence of love certainly stifles potentialities and even kills them.” (Toward a Psychology of Being:98)

            Love is the feeling environment within which exploration takes place, discoveries shared, and collective identities formed by a network of people who rely on each other to be fully present in each others lives.  Love orchestrates the harmonics of our emotional life, for it is the master emotion.  Emotions form a complementary field of heart awareness to the information networks of the mental field, as Candace Pert has shown in her book, Molecules of Emotion.  The chemical signatures of emotion link the individual mind and heart through the sympathetic, parasympathetic and autonomic nervous systems as the peoples of the earth are connected through the global electronic nervous system we call the Internet.  Human DNA has been called a biological internet that is superior in many respects to the artificial one.  But loving communion can have a powerful neurological effect on any two people engaged in meaningful communication.

            During extended and meaningful conversation, the brain activity of both people come to look remarkably similar, especially when the two are really understanding each other, a process scientific researchers call "neural coupling", and what folk wisdom calls “heart-to-heart communication.”

            Neural coupling occurs so well because it seems that there is a great deal of commonality between the process of producing speech and comprehending speech.  The more coupling there is, the more the speaker and the listener are using similar mechanisms.  Brain scans further show that in some areas of the brain, coupling occurs at the same time the speaker is talking, while in other areas, the coupling lags. Sometimes, brain activity in the listener's brain comes before the activity in the speaker's brain, suggesting the listener may be anticipating what the speaker is going to say.   Such mirror imaging may aid in comprehension—yet another support for the idea that we are literally hardwired to connect. 

            Brain scans of those who seemed to have the most nuanced understanding of each other showed the most complete neural coupling.   But even between those meeting for the first time, good neural coupling can almost instantly occur, possibly hinting at why some people click during conversation and some don't.  This neural coupling showed up as a strong correlation between how much of the listener's brain matched the speaker's brain and how well the listener understood the other.    

            Neural coupling is yet another term for the resonant harmony that is created between those engaged in distinctive and meaningful conversations, a harmony manifest in a synchronicity of hearts that matches the synchronicity of the mirror neurons in an observer's brain firing in the same sequence as those of the person he  is observing.  Perhaps this synchrony between one's own heart and brain and between the hearts and brains of those experiencing neural coupling occurs because more than half of the heart is actually composed of neurons of the same nature as those that make up the cerebral system. 

           If love and communication between family and friends are important not only at the meaning and feeling level, but even down to the level of neurons, in regards to building community, it becomes very important what is being communicated and how far that influence extends.  Perhaps the most important emotion to communicate is happiness. 

            A widely-publicized study from 2008 in the British Medical Journal reported that happiness in social networks may spread from person to person along cultural nerve pathways that mimic those within the body.  Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness tended to spread through close relationships like friends, siblings, spouses, and next-door neighbors, but that happiness spread more consistently than unhappiness through the network. Moreover, the structure of the social network appeared to have an impact on happiness, as people who were very central (with many friends and friends of friends) were significantly more likely to be happy than those on the periphery of the network. When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.  Overall, the results suggest that happiness might spread through a population like a virus.

            Happiness, then, sends a kind of ripple effect through social networks.  If someone changes from unhappy to happy in a network of friends others in the social network will become happy too, without necessarily knowing why.  A well-liked next-door neighbor’s joy will probably increase your own sense of happiness. 

            Even further, happiness is so contagious that it can ripple through clusters of people who might not even know each other.  While one’s emotional state would depend primarily on your own choices and actions and experience, it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people with whom you are not directly connected, lending support to calls to “commit random acts of kindness.”  One person's happiness can affect another's for up to a year, researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the "infectiousness" of that emotion appears to be far weaker.

            There is, then, little doubt, scientific or otherwise, that good human relationships are the most important ingredient in human happiness, especially if you can see or contact your friends and family often. Yet the competitive, me-first materialistic culture we live in tells people to sacrifice social relationships to get other things that likely won’t make them as happy, such as money.  Relationships are far more important to happiness than anything else.  Educators can build on this.