10

Understanding Emotional
Thought Can Transform
Educators’ Understanding
of How Students Learn
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb

The way students feel affects how they learn—a fact developmental psychol-
ogists and master educators have known long and well (e.g., Bruner, 1990;
Montessori, 1914, 2009; Nasir, 2012). Indeed, students’ abilities to recog-
nize, understand, and manage their emotions; to build and maintain a sense
of interest and curiosity; to persist through challenges and uncertainty; to
embrace new experiences; to imagine alternative futures for themselves and
their communities; and to feel purposeful . . . all of these powerfully influ-
ence personal and academic success (Damon, 2008; Duckworth & Seligman,
2005; Kaufman, 2013; Oyserman, 2015). Why is learning such an emotion-
dependent process, and what does this mean for teachers and schools?
Education research has for the past century, and with increasing empirical
evidence more recently, explored the contributions of social-emotional feel-
ings to students’ learning and achievement (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki,
Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Osher et al., 2016; Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry,
2002; Yeager & Walton, 2011). Terms referring to the impact of beliefs and
feelings in learning contexts have become widely used even in the non-
academic lexicon. For example, educators routinely speak of “stereotype
threat” (the phenomenon in which individuals’ fear of conforming to stereo-
types negatively influences their performance; Steele, 2011), “growth mindset”
(the belief that intelligence and talent can be changed with hard work; Dweck,
2006) and “grit” (the ability to persist in the face of frustrations; Duckworth,
2016). Popular press coverage of social-emotional learning (SEL) has bur-
geoned, and major consensus reports have focused on outlining the state of the
evidence on how SEL programs impact academic achievement (Jones & Kahn,
2017). In the United States, the value of supporting the “whole child” has even
been codified into law at the national level: the 2015 Every Student Succeeds
Act (Public Law No. 114–95, 2015) allows curriculum funds to be used to sup-
port social-emotional programming. Even the business community has argued
for the economic value of supporting the growth of students’ social-emotional
skills to prepare them for the collaborations, frustrations, and social relations of
the adult workplace (Brackett, Divecha, & Stern, 2015; Deming, 2017).
 Understanding Emotional Thought 245
And yet, despite the growing recognition that emotions are central to the
learning process, many educators and policy makers still implicitly believe that
engaging students’ interests and curiosities is a luxury that cannot be afforded
to students who are struggling academically, or to students who have trouble
appropriately managing their behavior and therefore require strict, prescripted
interventions that disregard and negate their feelings (Immordino-Yang, 2016;
Okonofua, Paunesku, & Walton, 2016). Too often, social-emotional learning
is viewed either as a luxury for those with the opportunity and the means, or as
a remediation strategy for the underprivileged or underperforming, rather than
as a universal need of all people. Others incorrectly view emotions as “inter-
fering” with clear-headed thinking—akin to an emotional toddler running
amuck with a baseball bat in a store that sells glassware (Immordino-Yang &
Damasio, 2007). Still others misunderstand the role of emotions, believing
that as long as students are “having fun,” teachers are adequately attending to
students’ wellbeing and deep learning (Immordino-Yang, 2015a).
Each of these perspectives gives way to a more nuanced and accurate view
once educators understand what emotions actually are from a developmental,
neuropsychological perspective, and what “learning”, in the broad, develop-
mental sense in which we mean it in education, actually entails. Why do we
have emotions, and how do emotions organize thinking? How is emotional
development influenced by the social and cultural context, including by the
micro-cultural context of the classroom? The purpose of this chapter is to
equip educators and those who work with young people with basic answers to
these questions, with the dual aims of helping them become more strategic in
how they leverage emotions in their work, and of helping them more convinc-
ingly advocate for policies consistent with the science.

The Making of an Emotion: Body, Brain, Mind,

and Consciousness in a Social World
Consider the experience of Alan, a 15-year-old from a crime-riddled neigh-
borhood in Los Angeles. In a radio interview he explained that three of his
friends, who were not involved in gangs, died because of separate instances
of gang violence. He recalls that he cried when his first friend died, and cried
when his second friend died, but by the third friend, he reported not being able
to believe that it had happened yet again. He described a feeling of shock and
disbelief, and was unable to mount any emotional response (KPCC Southern
California Public Radio, story by F. Stoltze [Ed.], 5–22–08).
Alan’s story is one of fear and sadness, of turning from compassion and
embodied, tearful awareness to numbness and shock. It is a story of empathy
come and gone, of emotion felt and lost, of consciousness altered by engage-
ment changed to disbelief. Alan speaks of his life in Los Angeles, but he could
be telling the story of many young people caught in urban violence, war or
abuse worldwide.
246  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb
In explaining his story, Alan gives away what social-affective neurosci-
ence is also uncovering: that the mind and body are tied together in emo-
tional experience. Alan cries for the deaths of his first two friends, innocent
bystanders caught in criminal violence. He subjectively feels the sadness of
their loss as an emotion that changes his body state, through crying as well
as other physiological changes, which typically include loss of energy, low-
ered heart rate, and a sad facial expression and physical posture, among other
things. Other more subtle changes would also be present as a result of his
reaction (Butler, Yang, Laube, Kühn, & Immordino-Yang, 2018). If we meas-
ured, we would expect to find changes in blood pressure, breathing patterns,
sleep patterns, and even digestion and immune responding (Barrett, 2017;
Sapolsky, 2017; Van der Kolk, 2015). These physiological changes, in turn,
would alter his mind in characteristic ways, potentially causing him to dwell
on the event (in effect, to continually use up cognitive resources thinking
about it), to have trouble concentrating on other topics, and perhaps even
shaking his ability to relate well to the other people he loves for fear that he
will lose them.
As we can see from Alan’s story, cognition and emotion each play a role in
Alan’s response to the tragic news, and his reaction reflects the interdepend-
ence of his body, brain, and mind. Alan learns (cognitively) of his friends’
deaths. His (cognitive) interpretation of the significance of these events auto-
matically triggers the (emotional) reaction of sadness. This reaction plays out
in part by modulating basic physiological life-regulatory processing in his body
and brain. These physiological changes are, in turn, sensed or “felt” by the
brain, where they have the possibility of shifting and shaping the kinds of
mental processing Alan is likely to engage going forward. In this way, what
Alan feels influences and is influenced by what he thinks and what he knows.
His cognitions and emotional responses are intertwined, not separate, and his
evolving understanding and affective experience become two dimensions of
the same mental process (Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Immordino-Yang, 2010), a
concept that we have previously termed “emotional thought” (Immordino-
Yang & Damasio, 2007). In this body ↔ brain ↔ mind cycle, emotions and
cognitions are intertwined in processes of thinking and learning, and to vary-
ing degrees influence and are influenced by changes in body state. (See also
Figure 10.1.)
Beyond the emotions that Alan reports for his first two friends’ deaths,
Alan’s experience illustrates another feature of the interdependence between
the mind and body in emotion. When his third friend dies, Alan’s reaction
breaks past his previous feeling of sadness to instead induce a state of shock.
That is, unable to reconcile the events he knows are true (his friends’ deaths)
with his knowledge about what ought to be true based on his previous expec-
tations (his friends’ presence), his emotion, cognition, and sense of self are
temporarily stunned. He does not cry for his third friend’s death because he
cannot connect his current knowledge to his past experiences in order to
engage his body and mind in an appropriate emotional reaction. Unable to
 Understanding Emotional Thought 247

EMOTION COGNITION

Emotional thought
Processes related The platform for learning, High reason/
to the body Rational thought
memory, decision-making, and
creativity, both in social and non-
social contexts.
Rational thought can inform
emotional thought. This is the
pathway of high-level social and
Body sensations, actual or
moral emotions, ethics, and of
simulated, contribute to
motivated reasoning. Creativity
feelings, which can in turn
can also be informed by high
influence thought.
reason.

Ad hoc imposition of rational

Thoughts can trigger emotions,
evidence on a decision formulated
which play out in the mind and on
within “emotional thought.”
the body.
Much of our moral decision
making happens via this route.

Figure 10.1 Social and Affective Neuroscientists Are Describing the Interrelatedness

of Emotion, Cognition, and the Body in Thinking and Consciousness.
The thought processes that educators care about—among them learning,
memory, creativity, and critical thought—involve both emotional and
cognitive aspects, and can involve the body as well as the mind. In the
diagram, the solid ellipse represents emotion; the dashed ellipse represents
cognition. The extensive overlap between the two ellipses represents the
domain of “emotional thought.” Emotional thought can be conscious or
non-conscious (below the level of conscious awareness) and is the means
by which bodily reactions influence the mind, and vice versa. High rea-
son is a small section of the diagram and refers to the most disembodied
and logical of thought processes, which are nevertheless informed by emo-
tional thought.
Source: Reprinted with permission from Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007).

make meaning of what happened, the resulting state feels to him like shock, or
the sense of numbness and disembodiment that many people report following
traumatic events and fear.
From a scientific perspective, Alan’s reaction to his third friend’s death
illustrates the neuropsychological connection between affect and mechanisms
of consciousness (Damasio, 1994/2005). Alan is describing the altered state
of awareness he experienced at such an overwhelming event and alluding to
the cognitive disconnect between his previous experiences and this new occur-
rence, by describing his disbelief about what had just happened. When Alan
248  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb
is unable to assimilate the knowledge of his third friend’s death into the rest
of what he knows about how the world ought to work, he cannot mount an
appropriate, coherent emotional response in his body and mind, and shows
no overt emotional display. He notices a change in his perceived level of
­consciousness—a state of detachment or disembodiment—which he describes
as shock and disbelief.
Finally, though we do not know more about how these effects played out for
Alan over time, it is common for survivors of this kind of trauma to later have
altered memories of the event and surrounding context. Typically they hold
either highly crystalline, vivid, and focused memories of one moment in time
that are unresolvable (the kind of memories that can be intrusive and lead to
syndromes such as post-traumatic stress disorder; Harris, 2018), or they have
very vague memories and amnesia (Lynn et al., 2014; Van der Kolk, 2015).
Either way, survivors of trauma or those experiencing undue stress illustrate
how emotion and cognition are interdependent in the formation of memories.
They also illustrate how, when either emotion or cognition dominates the
thinking process too much, the resulting learning tends either to be less flex-
ible and transferable to new contexts, or weaker overall.

Emotions Steer Thinking: The Balanced Interdependence

of Cognition and Emotion, and the Importance
of Emotional Relevance
How does the discussion of Alan help us understand how emotions relate
to learning in school? Though Alan’s tragic situation is extreme compared
to the emotions most students and teachers experience daily in classrooms,
nonetheless the principles are the same in both cases. In essence, emotion
plays a role in engaging the neural substrate for thinking by helping people
attend to, evaluate and react to stimuli, situations, and happenings, and then
to integrate what they have attended to and evaluated into their knowledge
structures and memory in a coordinated way going forward. It may be helpful
to understand emotions as steering thinking, like a rudder steers a ship (Dama-
sio, 1994/2005; Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007). Thinking, in turn, pro-
motes learning, as thoughts are compared with previous knowledge called up
from memory, and integrated and reconciled to build updated understand-
ing. Unsurprisingly given the interdependence of these processes, extensive
research now makes clear that the brain networks supporting emotion and
bodily sensation, and those supporting learning and memory, are functionally
intertwined (Immordino-Yang, Christodoulou, & Singh, 2012; Panksepp &
Biven, 2012), even for expertise in technical domains like mathematics (Zeki,
Romaya, Benincasa, & Atiyah, 2014). Emotions are an essential and ubiq-
uitous dimension of thought, important for shifting thought patterns and
for forming and recalling memories (Immordino-Yang & Singh, 2013; Perry,
Hendler, & Shamay-Tsoory, 2011; Phelps, 2004; Yang, Pavarini, Schnall, &
Immordino-Yang, 2018).
 Understanding Emotional Thought 249
As we can see, though the emotions and cognitions from an episode can be
analyzed separately, emotions are not separate from cognition in the mind, as
earlier generations of cognitive science researchers believed (Gardner, 1985).
It is much more conducive to think deeply about or remember information
about which we have had genuine emotion, because the healthy brain does
not waste energy processing information that does not matter to the indi-
vidual (Immordino-Yang, 2015a). However, this means that for emotions to
enhance and drive academic achievement and deep learning in school, the
emotions induced need to be, as directly as possible, relevant to the ideas
being engaged with (Immordino-Yang & Faeth, 2010; Mather, 2007). In other
words, people mostly think about and remember the topic that the emotion
pertains to—in Alan’s case, relationships, insecurity, death, and loss. Alan’s
emotions could help him learn deeply about the injustices of gang violence, or
about the importance of safety for building trusting attachments and friend-
ships, but they would likely interfere with his ability to learn math or some
other academic subject.
To sum up, emotions promote thinking which in turn promotes learning—
but the vital question for educators is, “about what?” If the emotions being
felt during scholarly activities pertain not to disciplinary, intellectual ideas
but instead to something else (e.g., the trauma one has experienced, the foot-
ball match later, the grade one hopes for, or what others will think about my
performance), then the emotion will likely interfere with the learning that
teachers intend to foster in their classrooms. This is why overuse of extrinsic
rewards like prizes and payment in exchange for completed schoolwork tends
not to improve learning and even to undermine deep understanding, inter-
est, and enjoyment of learning over time (Allan & Fryer, 2011; Kuhbandner,
Aslan, Emmerdinger, & Murayama, 2016; Murayama, Matsumoto, Izuma, &
Matsumoto, 2010); why high-arousal “fun” and exciting school activities tend
not to result in improved understanding of the underlying concepts (Okan,
2003; Meinhardt & Pekrun, 2003); and why children who don’t feel safe in
school have trouble learning from their classes (Glew, Fan, Katon, Rivara, &
Kernic, 2005). In each of these cases, the emotions students are experiencing
do not enrich the nature of their conceptual understanding. By contrast, stu-
dents grow and achieve more over time if the emotions they are experiencing
pertain to ideas and skills they are meant to be learning (Perkins, 2014). For
example, students may feel pride and satisfaction at truly understanding some-
thing new and explaining it successfully to classmates, feel interest or curiosity
about why a science experiment works, or feel inspired to create a touch-
ing essay that truly expresses their perspective and moves those who read it
(Hantzopoulos, 2016; Taylor, 2017). Each of these situations promotes deeper
engagement and learning because the student feels emotionally connected to
the intellectual endeavor or process of meaningful learning, rather than to
superficial, immediate, distracting or irrelevant outcomes or circumstances
(Hubberman, Duffy, Mason, Zeiser, & O’Day, 2016; Immordino-Yang &
Faeth, 2010; Savery, 2015).
250  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb
During learning, emotions help us set goals, tell us when to keep working
and when to stop, when we are on the right path to solve a problem and when
we need to change course, what we should remember and what is not impor-
tant, etc. (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007). People are willing to work
harder to learn the content and skills they are emotionally engaged with, and
they are emotionally engaged when the content and skills they are learning
seem useful for understanding the world or are connected to their curiosities,
motivations, and future goals (Engel, 2015). Conversely, emotions like anxi-
ety can undermine learning by causing worrying, which depletes cognitive
resources and activates thought patterns (and neural activity patterns) associ-
ated with fear and escape rather than with academic thinking (Beilock, 2010).
(The most effective fix, not surprisingly, is not to ignore the anxiety or to try
to suppress it. It is, instead, to reappraise what the bodily sensations associated
with arousal and nervousness actually imply about one’s ability to succeed,
which probably is not much [Brady, Hard, & Gross, 2018]). Thinking begets
emotion, and emotion begets thinking, and when these processes feed off each
other and pertain to core ideas implicit in the work at hand, then high-quality
learning is more likely to happen.

Many Emotions in Education Are Social and Cultural,

Even When Working Alone
Think again of the reactions that Alan described in his interview. His reac-
tions involve perceived changes to his own body and mind. And yet, per-
haps least obvious but most important, these reactions are induced by Alan’s
thoughts about events that happened to other people with whom he had rela-
tionships. In this way, Alan illustrates how, from a neuropsychological per-
spective, the mechanisms involved in the feeling and regulation of the body
and consciousness also double as a platform for the social mind (Fiske, 2014;
Immordino-Yang, Chiao, & Fiske, 2010).
Many of the emotions most relevant for learning are either implicitly or
explicitly social. They often pertain to the self in relation to other people,
to one’s interpretations of others’ beliefs, or to socially constructed values
and morals that guide decision making, goal setting, and outcome evaluation
(Damasio, 2018; Kaplan et al., 2017; Pekrun et al., 2002). Children come
prepared to observe, imitate, and learn from those around them (Bandura,
1977; Gopnik, 2016; Moll, 2018; Tomasello, 2009). As they grow, they search
to identify the tools, skills, and concepts that seem most relevant to their
future, and they naturally want to adapt to the norms and expectations of their
social context (Montessori, 1914/2009; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1929). In this
way, brain development and functioning, like the learning they support, are
socially and culturally contextualized—they happen in the context of cultural
experiences, social relationships, and cognitive opportunities, as subjectively
perceived and emotionally experienced by the learner. This is true even when
the person is working alone or independently, because the emotion-related
 Understanding Emotional Thought 251
cultural norms and goals the person has previously internalized shape how she
interprets situations, builds goals, and remembers the situation into the future
(Rogoff, 2003; Bruner, 1972).
Neuropsychological research has even revealed that, cumulatively, socio-
cultural experience shifts which brain regions’ activations correlate with
experiences of emotions (as described on pages 254–255; Immordino-Yang &
Yang, 2017; Immordino-Yang, Yang, & Damasio, 2014, 2016). Interpreted in
a developmental light, such data suggest that individuals may learn to rely on
different cues and thought patterns to know how they are emotionally feeling.
For example, a person struggling to calm himself and focus may come to realize
that he is deeply angered by a situation, or a person may feel her heart pound-
ing and interpret this as evidence that she is excited or, alternately, afraid.
Over time, the person’s interpretation of socially situated experiences contrib-
utes to the development of cultural identity, as broader patterns emerge across
interactions and situations, and one’s responses take on significance related
to personal meaning, values, and group memberships (Gutiérrez & Rogoff,
2003; Immordino-Yang & Gotlieb, 2017; Nasir, 2012). Here, the person who
is angered may decide that he does not fit in the cultural group of peers who
triggered his anger and is not “like them,” or the person feeling excited may
decide to further pursue and devote work to the issue at hand, perhaps mak-
ing that issue her life’s work. In both cases, the person is interpreting social-
emotional cues and deciding what these feelings mean for his or her roles,
skills, and identities. This, in turn, impacts what the person does, believes, and
values, and who they become.
Figure 10.2 summarizes these mechanisms in a graphic illustration. As the
framework illustrates, individuals’ thoughts about themselves and other peo-
ple, and their interpretations and beliefs about situations, result in and are
shaped by emotions. These emotions can play out as activation patterns or
simulations in the “feeling” (somatosensory) systems of the brain—the regions
in the brain responsible for sensing the body (see also Figure 10.3). They can
also leak down onto the actual body, causing physiological changes in systems
important for survival, such as changes to heart rate, skin sweating, breathing,
and digestion (the “Emotion Induction” arrow in the figure). As is represented
by the “Feeling Construction” arrow in the figure, bodily arousal patterns are
mapped by the “feeling” systems of the brain, where they have the possibility
of influencing how a person feels emotionally—nervous, for example—and
hence what they are likely to think about next. For example, if a person going
into a math test interpreted their arousal as a nervous feeling, they may think
next about how they might fail their math exam, and how embarrassing and
demeaning that would be. Such a thought pattern would not be conducive to
thinking about math concepts and procedures and could therefore undermine
performance.
The thoughts we have about ourselves and other people, termed the “social
mind,” are intermediate between perceived bodily sensations and the meaning
an individual makes of a situation (Barrett, 2017; Damasio, 1999). Following
252  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb

Cultural Meaning

Social Mind

Embodied Brain

Body

Figure 10.2 A Depiction of the Dynamic Interdependence of the Body and Embodied

Brain, the Social Mind, and Processes of Cultural Meaning-making Dur-
ing Experiences of Emotion.
Source: Figure reprinted with permission from Immordino-Yang & Gotlieb, 2017.

the math test/nervousness example, a person could interpret that a math test
is important for social standing and future goals. He could also interpret that
his teacher doesn’t have high expectations for him, based on who his friends
and family are, what ethnic group he belongs to, or his past history. Even if
he were capable of doing the math, the meaning he would have made about
the test’s importance, coupled with the meaning he makes of the teacher’s
expectations, would likely cause him to release stress hormones into his body
and brain. These would cause his heart to beat faster, his blood pressure to rise
and his digestion to slow (hence, the “dry mouth” that accompanies stress;
Sapolsky, 2017). The feeling of his pounding heart, light-headedness, and dry
mouth could be sensed by the brain and that arousal could be interpreted as
reflecting threat, which in turn could reinforce his belief that, even though
he knows the math outside of the testing situation, in the test he is likely
to “freeze” and fail. This could in turn push him to think more about how
 Understanding Emotional Thought 253

Figure 10.3 Social Emotions Recruit Brain Systems Essential for Survival and Con-
sciousness, in Addition to Those Involved in High-level Cognition.
The figure shows a sagittal (left image; x = +2) and transverse (right image; z = +5)
slice of the brain that maps brain areas (in orange) that are more active as individuals
are reporting feeling inspired after learning of another person’s virtue and triumph over
adversity, compared to when they report no strong emotional reaction. The insula is
visceral somatosensory cortex, which is involved not only in feeling the guts but also
in processing self-awareness and subjective emotional experience. The default-mode
network is a constellation of regions that functionally communicate during narrative-
like processing that moves the thinker out of the “here and now,” for example during
daydreaming, thinking about moral values, prospecting about the future, and remem-
bering past experiences. The brainstem lies between the body and the rest of the brain
and contains densely packed fiber tracts and nuclei essential for basic physiological
regulation, consciousness, and survival. Figure reprinted with permission from Immor-
dino-Yang & Gotlieb, 2017. Data are from Immordino-Yang et al., 2009. The image is
thresholded at the False Discovery Rate q < 0.05.

important the test is and how failing will reinforce his teacher’s low expecta-
tions for “people like him.” Cycling through these frantic thoughts, in turn,
will use up working memory resources, further depleting his ability to think
about math (Beilock, 2010). The result is a downward spiral in performance—
a self-­perpetuating cycle of social thoughts, emotions, and meaning termed
“stereotype threat” that undermines cognitive performance as well as schol-
arly agency, self-efficacy and identity development, not to mention health
and wellbeing (Aronson, Burgess, Phelan, & Juarez, 2013; Spencer, Logel, &
Davies, 2016; Steele, 2011).
In an alternative scenario, a person with the same cultural interpretation of
the importance of the test but a different way of making meaning about her
own academic potential and her teacher’s expectations could have a different
254  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb
outcome. For that person, the perceived importance of math achievement
and her need for math to pursue broader questions that interest her could
lead to arousal during the test-taking situation. But, this person could inter-
pret or “feel” her bodily arousal as indicating that she is “up for the challenge
and interested” rather than “nervous and worried about failure” (Beilock &
Maloney, 2015; Jamieson, Mendes, & Nock, 2013). Such an interpreta-
tion would be facilitated by positive cultural norms in the school and family
around math achievement and ability, strong supports and expectations for
such growth-oriented achievement in the school, and teaching practices that
reinforce students’ becoming curious about math (Baehr, 2013). This person’s
challenge-oriented meaning-making process would help her recall informa-
tion pertaining to math (Beilock, 2010; Engel, 2015), as well as strengthen
her willingness to try hard, helping strengthen her performance. In addition,
this person’s test-taking experience would bolster and reinforce her math
learning through successful recall practice via a process termed the “testing
effect” (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Juxtaposing these two people’s meaning-
making, one interpreting arousal as nervousness and fear of failure and one
interpreting arousal as an experience of healthy challenge and interest, high-
lights one way that emotional, social, and cultural processes impact cognition,
and by extension, academic performance (Pekrun, Elliott, & Maier, 2009).
Interestingly, the physiological manifestations of arousal interpreted as stress
can be differentiated from those associated with arousal interpreted as chal-
lenge, and have different implications as well for bodily health (Blascovich,
2008; Blascovich & Tomaka, 1996).

Brain Systems for Feeling the Gut Are Co-opted for

Emotional Experiences, but “Gut Feelings” Reflect
Extensive Learning Rather Than Naïve Intuitions
Ample research now supports that we understand and mount social-emo-
tional reactions like the nervousness versus challenged reactions described
in the previous section by feeling (or mentally simulating) our subjective
responses (Immordino-Yang, 2010). This process recruits the visceral soma-
tosensory cortex that senses our own “gut” in the direct sense—the same
brain region implicated when we experience a stomachache or a pounding
heart (Immordino-­Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009; Damasio et al.,
2000). In that sense, we really do live with “gut feelings” (Immordino-Yang,
2011; see also Figure 10.3). Critical for educators to realize, though, is that
we develop the ability to have complex gut feelings through learning and
experience (Immordino-Yang, 2015a), because feelings of this sort require
elaborated, culturally shaped cognition (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross,
2007; Immordino-Yang, 2010; Immordino-Yang & Yang, 2017; Kaplan et al.,
2017). Though more basic emotions like disgust to spoiled food require much
less learning if any (Ekman, 1973), an emotional appreciation for art, moral
righteousness, or mathematical equations each require extensive opportunities
 Understanding Emotional Thought 255
for thinking, engaging, and problem solving within the domain. Yet, these
complex emotions still engage neural systems for visceral somatosensation and
autonomic (bodily physiological) regulation, just as do more basic emotions
like disgust to spoiled food or attraction to delicious food (Immordino-Yang
et al., 2009; Vessel, Starr, & Rubin, 2013; Wicker et al., 2003; Zeki, Romaya,
Benincasa, & Atiyah, 2014). In turn, as we mentally perceive and cognitively
deliberate on feelings associated with objects, people, situations, and their
implications, brain networks involved in the processing of memories and nar-
ratives are increasingly coordinated and engaged (Immordino-Yang & Singh,
2013; Kaplan et al., 2017; Yang, Bossmann, Schiffhauer, Jordan, & Immordino-
Yang, 2013). Memories, mental simulations in the form of plans and imagin-
ings, cognitions and sensations come together into concerted mental states
that make our experiences feel coherent and “like they matter” (Barrett, 2017;
Damasio, 1999).
It is this subjective feeling—the feeling that what one is experiencing and
thinking about matters—that effective educational practices leverage. Con-
sider, for example, the impact on learning of a student’s feeling of wonder
when he comes to appreciate that all life on earth evolved from a single-celled
organism, or consider the powerful benefits for learning of a student’s anger
as she reads about a country’s history of voter suppression techniques. Indi-
viduals’ emotional reactions to the content they learn can precipitate further
thinking and reflection, which enhances memory formation (Craik & Tulv-
ing, 1975) and furthers learning. This has powerful implications for educators.
It suggests that facilitating students’ affective processing is not something to
do merely so that students attend in the moment or exercise control over their
inappropriate negative emotions; rather, attending to students’ affective pro-
cessing about task-relevant information is also a powerful way to strengthen
their learning. Teachers who cultivate students’ empathies, curiosities, and
interests relative to academic subjects can help at-risk students to achieve on
par with their low-risk peers (Hamre & Pianta, 2005; Hantzopoulos, 2016).
Rigorous randomized experimental studies and meta-analyses of hundreds of
studies suggest that investing in social-emotional learning does not merely
produce better behaved students or kinder citizens; it also helps students
achieve greater long-term academic success (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki,
Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Jones, Brown, & Aber, 2011; Taylor, Oberle, Dur-
lak, & Weissberg, 2017).
It is also important for educators to understand that emotional feelings
are subjective experiences. As such, they vary across people. The neuropsy-
chological work on feelings suggests that individuals may vary not only in
which emotions come up in particular situations, but, reminiscent of the math
student who feels challenged rather than threatened, potentially individu-
als may vary also in the processes they invoke to know exactly how they are
feeling. This idea is founded in data on emotion-related activation patterns
in the insula, a brain region important for emotional experience and evalu-
ative aspects of cognition that is also involved in feeling visceral sensations
256  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb
like heartbeats and stomachache (Craig, 2002; Damasio et al., 2000; Kurth,
Zilles, Fox, Laird, & Eickhoff, 2010; Zaki, Davis, & Ochsner, 2012). Our lon-
gitudinal and cross-cultural data suggest that people may learn from cultural
and social experiences how to translate physiological activation patterns into
conscious emotional feelings, as insula activity can correspond to emotional
feelings differently depending on social, cultural, and developmental factors
(Immordino-Yang, 2015b; Immordino-Yang & Yang, 2014, 2017).
For example, in one study we found that the words people use to describe
their emotional feelings in an interview predict differences in the neural activ-
ity patterns they show when reacting to emotional stories in the fMRI scanner.
In this study, people who described their feelings using a higher proportion
of cognitive words, like “think”, “know”, and “believe,” did not report feel-
ing weaker emotions than individuals who used affective words such as “sad,”
“cry” or “warm”. But those who used more cognitive words showed relatively
less activation in somatosensory cortices for the same reported strength of feel-
ing, compared to the activation levels for those who used a higher proportion
of affective words (Saxbe, Yang, Borofsky, & Immordino-Yang, 2013). The
findings suggest that participants varied in the degree to which their feelings
were neurally embodied. The implication from these neural data, which could
not have been known from the psychological measures alone, is that while
some individuals’ emotions seem to play out in bodily, sensory feelings, others’
emotional feelings may be less bodily and more cognitive in nature. In other
words, people can vary in the processes by which they feel their emotions,
even when they all claim to be experiencing strong emotion.
In another set of studies, we aimed to test whether such differences could be
partly learned. To do this, we set out to test whether cultural differences may
exist in the neural correlates of emotional feelings. If individuals from differ-
ent cultural groups report feeling the same emotions when reacting to a set of
stories, for example, but show different patterns of correspondence between
brain activity and their reported feelings, it would suggest that individuals in
the two groups are potentially processing the same emotion in a different way.
If a bicultural group of individuals, who have been exposed to both cultural
contexts, show an intermediate or mixed pattern of results, this would suggest
that the newly discovered cultural group difference is not genetic or racial, but
learned. Because differences in emotion processing could have implications for
behavior, decision making, and learning, such findings would have important
implications for education. They would potentially provide new insights into
appropriate educational cultural accommodations, and open the possibility
that the cultural environments of schools may also be shaping the processes
by which young people come to experience their social-emotional lives—both
topics that would warrant further research.
A series of experiments carried out in Los Angeles and Beijing with
university students uncovered cultural patterns of activity during emo-
tional experiences, as we had suspected (Immordino-Yang et al., 2014,
2016; Immordino-Yang & Yang, 2017). Chinese, American, and bicultural
 Understanding Emotional Thought 257
Chinese-American participants were asked to explain their feelings about
each of a series of true social stories to an experimenter in a private interview,
and then to watch the stories again during fMRI scanning and to report again
their feelings as they watched. We found that the groups did not differ in how
strongly they reported feeling in response to the stories, or in how much brain
activation they showed. However, the Chinese and American groups did dif-
fer in how their brain activity corresponded in real-time to their reported feel-
ings. While American participants’ feelings tended to track with the dorsal,
more somatosensory and cognitive sector of the insula, Chinese participants’
feelings tended to track with the ventral sector, which is evolutionarily older
and more autonomic regulatory (Kurth et al., 2010). Supporting the inter-
pretation that this difference was learned rather than genetic, the bicultural
Chinese-American participants showed an intermediate pattern that fell
between the Chinese and the American norms. The findings were replicated.
A follow-up study suggested that the cultural differences may follow from
Americans’ learned emphasis on expressiveness and Chinese people’s learned
emphasis on suppressing overt emotional displays. We found that cultural dif-
ferences in the correlations between insula activity and feelings were mediated
by participants’ emotional expressiveness in the interview: Americans tended
to be more emotionally demonstrative in their interview behavior than had
been the Chinese participants, in accordance with American and Chinese
cultural expressiveness norms (Tsai, 2007). And it was actually these individ-
ual differences in expressiveness, regardless of cultural group, that explained
the neural findings. More expressive people in all three cultural groups tended
toward the average American neural pattern (Immordino-Yang et al., 2016),
as if their more pronounced bodily changes during emotion had “taught” them
to attend more to the feeling of their body in deciding how they feel emotion-
ally. (For those interested in the details, we also measured psychophysiological
reactions on participants’ bodies as they felt emotions, allowing us to analyze
the degree to which emotional feelings were related to patterns of bodily reac-
tions like sweating, breathing, and heart rate increases.)
Essentially, we interpreted these findings to suggest that the way in which
people had translated their neurophysiological responses into conscious feel-
ings, or how they had become aware of what they were feeling, was different
based on cultural norms for expressiveness that participants in every group had
adopted to varying degrees. One implication is that how schools teach young
people to behave may shape over time the processes by which they feel their
bodily reactions and emotions, and such shaping may interact with home-
culture norms—a topic that is the focus of current research.
Bringing the research closer to education-relevant questions, we next
asked: if cultural experience may shape how individuals feel their emotions,
and if emotions in social situations influence social-emotional identity devel-
opment, how might differences in adolescents’ natural visceral sensation
sensitivity impact their identities? To begin to examine this, we investigated
how bicultural American youths’ sensitivity to heartbeat sensations would be
258  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb
related to their ethnic identity development. Heartbeat sensitivity naturally
varies among people, and is known to be associated with the thickness of cor-
tex in the insula (visceral somatosensory cortex; Craig, 2002). Ethnic identity
reflects young peoples’ subjective decision about the degree to which their core
identity is from their home culture versus from the mainstream culture outside
their home, in this case mainstream American culture. We studied adoles-
cents from East-Asian and Latino immigrant families, because these cultural
groups have different ideals for expressiveness, with East Asians being on aver-
age less expressive than mainstream American ideals, and Latinos being more
so (Spencer & Markstrom-Adams, 1990; Tsai, 2007). We reasoned that indi-
viduals with greater sensitivity to heartbeat sensations would find the feeling
of bodily emotional expressions more salient. Therefore, we hypothesized that
more sensitivity would align with Latino ideals and reinforce home-culture
identity for the Latino participants, but potentially undermine home-culture
identity for the East Asians because of the desired suppression of emotional
expressiveness by that cultural group.
We found that the adolescents’ reported home culture identity grew
stronger as youths grew older, and was stronger in youths who had witnessed
less ethnically motivated violence and who had reported higher quality rela-
tionships with their parents. Controlling for these effects, though, identity
also interacted with natural variance in visceral interoceptive sensitivity
(studied using electrocardiograms to test the accuracy of participants’ reported
heartbeat rhythm after running up and down sets of stairs). As hypothesized,
among youths from Latino families, greater sensitivity predicted stronger iden-
tification with home culture values in a questionnaire and an interview, while
among youths from East-Asian families, less sensitivity to heartbeat sensations
was associated with stronger endorsement of home culture (Cheng, Yang,
Hobeika, & Immordino-Yang, 2015; Immordino-Yang & Gotlieb, 2017). We
interpreted these findings to mean that in addition to known social factors like
family relationships, natural variation in the neural processing of embodied
experience may have influenced these bicultural youths’ adoption of cultural
identities by influencing how strongly they “feel like” a “Latino” or an “Asian”
person versus like an “American”.
As educators know, ethnic identity has implications not only for social rela-
tionships but, for example, for vulnerability to stereotypes around achieve-
ment goals (Gonzales, Blanton, & Williams, 2002; Steele, 2011; Tine &
Gotlieb, 2013). Notably, the aim of this work is not to document cultural
group differences—and indeed, there were no differences in the degree to
which the two groups identified with home versus American culture, and
no differences in their heartbeat detection accuracy. Instead, our aim was to
document how visceral somatosensory sensitivity in the brain may interact
with exposure to cultural norms, values, and expectations to shape identity
development over time. Individual differences in bodily feelings experienced
in social-emotional situations appeared to have been interpreted by these ado-
lescents as either reinforcing or undermining home cultural identity based
 Understanding Emotional Thought 259
on whether those feelings align with the largely unstated values and norms
of that culture. In addition to shifting the kinds of stereotypes for achieve-
ment that students apply to themselves, which can differ between Latino and
Chinese-American culture, one implication for education, still being tested,
is that embodied experiences of emotion in school settings may influence how
young people learn to identify with school and feel like a “scholar,” similar to
how social-emotional experiences in the home influence how young people
develop home-culture identity. Feelings of belonging are critical to academic
persistence and success in school (Walton & Cohen, 2007), but the role of
emotional experiences in the development of scholarly identity, though a
powerful force, is not fully understood.

What Has Neuroscience Added to Our Understanding

Over and Above Psychology?
One might ask how neuroscience supports our understanding of students’ psy-
chological need to learn how to feel. As explained earlier, our neural develop-
ment, psychological development, and enculturation are entwined processes
and shape one another. The biopsychosocial framework for affective pro-
cessing (Figure 10.2) and several examples throughout this chapter suggest
that to understand the relation between emotion and learning we need to
consider the body, embodied brain, social mind, cultural context, and their
mutual interdependences. Analyzing development from multiple perspectives,
including from a neuroscientific perspective, gives a new window into the hid-
den complexities of the interactions that undergird learning.
What the neural data, taken together with the psychological and behavioral
data, reveal is that the paths by which students come to know how they feel
about academically relevant content may differ in ways that reflect individual
experiences, inherent proclivities and cultural shaping, and cognitive develop-
ment (Immordino-Yang, 2015a). This variability is real and adaptive and should
be explained and leveraged rather than explained away. Educators, then, need
to be sensitive not only to what emotions students have, which is increasingly
a focus of education research (e.g., Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012), but
also to the variability in how they interpret those emotions to construct expe-
riences that both reflect past learning and shape future learning. Such models
of emotional-cognitive mechanisms could only be possible with an interdisci-
plinary, developmental combination of approaches that capture aspects of the
biological as well as psychological dimensions (Thomas, Ansari, & Knowland,
2019), and test the implications for educational contexts.

What Are the Concrete Implications of Research

and Opportunities for Translation?
The research implications for policy and practice concern effective educa-
tional environments that can promote the development of scholarly thinking
260  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb
and belonging by leveraging emotion. The studies described in this chap-
ter focus on social and cultural forces that shape development. Though these
studies do not directly test the effects of schooling, they teach us about the
power of emotional experiences and embodied sensations in organizing neu-
ral systems involved in psychological growth and learning. Schools certainly
induce emotional reactions from students and from teachers, and schools are a
form of cultural setting (Gutiérrez, 2002). Bringing this neural level of expla-
nation to bear can enrich the conversation about the impacts of emotions
in school, and in particular help teachers and policy makers appreciate the
deep interdependence of emotional and cognitive development over time.
Because this work has begun to document developmental effects, research that
specifically targets academic experience in schools can now build onto these
findings. One branch of such research, just launching in Immordino-Yang’s
laboratory and collaborating public schools, is targeting the role of school- and
classroom-level emotional enculturation, specifically in the development of
so-called “intellectual virtues” (e.g., interest, curiosity, intellectual humility,
intellectual agency, etc.; Baehr, 2013) on both students’ and teachers’ psycho-
logical and neural development and learning.
Though the empirical evidence from schools is mainly psychological rather
than neural at this point, the educational research findings are better under-
stood when taken together with the neural laboratory work that reveals the
hidden neurobiological mechanisms (Immordino-Yang & Christodoulou,
2014; Immordino-Yang & Gotlieb, 2017). For example, there are still debates
over the centrality of emotion to learning among policy makers, administra-
tors, and practitioners (especially among practitioners who work with adoles-
cents and young adults). The neural work helps make clear why ignoring the
roles of cultural and emotional processes to instead focus overly on standardized
“learning outcomes” is misled, and unlikely to produce satisfying explanations
for learning underperformance or actionable improvement strategies (Immor-
dino-Yang, Darling-Hammond, & Krone, 2018; Immordino-Yang, Darling-
Hammond, & Krone, 2019). Optimal pedagogical practices foster engagement,
thinking, and meaning-making by leveraging opportunities to strengthen, bal-
ance, and mutually reinforce the cognitive and emotional dimensions of think-
ing and problem solving (Erickson & Gutiérrez, 2002), in part because these
dimensions are mutually reinforcing in the brain. The work suggests that to do
education well requires maximizing use of culturally relevant, meaningful, and
generative tasks (Hantzopoulos, 2016; Immordino-Yang, 2016)—tasks where
the emotions being experienced are relevant to the concepts being learned.
In these sorts of tasks, students’ emotions are driving further thinking so that
students are process oriented, experiencing productive emotions as they work,
rather than end-point oriented, experiencing their strongest emotions only
after the work is complete (Immordino-Yang, 2015a; Kuhn, 2007).
Such high-quality educational practices share various features. They place
the learners’ subjective emotional and social experience at the forefront, and
 Understanding Emotional Thought 261
help people build scholarly and social identities that incorporate their new
skills and knowledge. They help people to feel safe and purposeful, and to
believe that their work is important, relevant, and valuable. They support
age-appropriate exploration and discovery, followed by cognitive elaboration
for deeper understanding. And, they support the learners in pacing themselves
to iteratively and authentically move between these modes of engagement
as they pursue meaningful learning goals. Mounting evidence suggests that
when students are working hard because they are steering toward intrinsic,
problem-centered goals, and not primarily because they are trying to sat-
isfy some relatively arbitrary milestone to be “done” or “successful,” deep
thinking and transfer of knowledge are more likely to happen (Kuhbandner,
Aslan, Emmerdinger, & Murayama, 2016; Marsh, Pekrun, Lichtenfeld, Guo,
Arens, & Murayama, 2016; Ryan & Deci, 2000).
Effective pedagogical approaches also strategically alternate activities that
encourage flexible and exploratory thinking with those that encourage mastery
of necessary building-block skills. Doing so attends to the trade-off between
plasticity and efficiency in brain and cognitive development (Immordino-
Yang, 2007, 2015a), and taps into the emotions associated with each mode.
When individuals rehearse and automate skills, they come to experience the
satisfaction of mastery and build self-efficacy in scholarship (Bandura, 1993;
Schunk & Zimmerman, 2007). However, doing this too much leads to bore-
dom and a lack of intellectual ambition (Pekrun, Hall, Goetz, & Perry, 2014),
and can undermine transfer and persistence when encountering new mate-
rial (Ainley, Hidi, & Berndorff, 2002; Marsh et al., 2016). When individuals
explore and investigate in a more open-ended way, they invoke emotions like
curiosity that lead to motivation and the formation of more durable memories
for the new information (Engel, 2015; Spelke & Schulz, 2011). Experiencing
such emotions helps students acquire habits of mind that facilitate acquisition
of age-appropriate knowledge and skills, reasoning, and ethical reflectiveness
(Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, & Damon, 2008; Perkins, 2014). These habits
of mind—in effect, cultural ways of thinking and feeling—become tools for
navigating the world as a learner, bringing curiosity, interest, persistence, and
a deep thirst for understanding (Baehr, 2013). Educators and education policy
makers’ responsibility is to foster the conditions, emotional as well as cogni-
tive, that support the development of these habits of mind (Perkins, 2014).

Exploring Additional Resources

Recent discussions in education underscore that young people’s social, emo-
tional, and academic development (SEAD) are intertwined (Jones & Kahn,
2017; Osher, Cantor, Berg, Steyer, & Rose, 2018). An overview of affective
processing helps explain why this is so, and what it means for effective educa-
tional practices and policies. In the vein of supporting educators in thinking
about student’s social-emotional development from a holistic, interdisciplinary
262  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca J.M. Gotlieb
perspective, we offer several recommendations about further resources that
may be of interest:

• An online masters-level course about affective and social neuroscience

and education, entitled “Neuroscience and the Classroom: Making Connec-
tions”. The course is freely available at www.learner.org/courses/neuroscience/
(Immordino-Yang was content director.) (Schneps [Producer], 2011).
• Emotions, learning and the brain: Exploring the educational implications of affec-
tive neuroscience, (2015) http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Mary-Helen-
Immordino-Yang/
The book presents ten years of work building social-affective neurosci-
ence, and forges connections to education. Each chapter begins with a set
of orienting notes and framing for educators. The book has been trans-
lated into Italian by Cortina Press, Spanish by AIQUE Publishing House
in Argentina, and Mandarin by Tsinghua University Press.
• “Embodied brains, social minds, cultural meaning: Integrating neurosci-
entific and educational research on social-affective development,” (2017)
by Immordino-Yang and Gotlieb, published in the American Education
Research Journal. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0002831
216669780
• “Emotion, Sociality, and the Brain’s Default Mode Network: Insights for
Educational Practice and Policy,” (2016) by Immordino-Yang, published
in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. http://journals.
sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2372732216656869
• The Alliance for Excellent Education has various resources available,
including a 2018 consensus report on the Science of Adolescent Learn-
ing. https://all4ed.org/
• The Aspen Institute has launched a National Commission on Social,
Emotional and Academic Development (SEAD): www.aspeninstitute.
org/programs/national-commission-on-social-emotional-and-academic-
development/
In particular, the consensus report entitled, “The Evidence Base for How
We Learn: Supporting Students’ Social, Emotional, and Academic Devel-
opment” is particularly relevant. www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/
evidence-base-learn/. So is a new brief on the science of brain development
and implications for educational policy and practice, written by Mary Helen
Immordino-Yang, Linda Darling Hammond and Christina Krone: www.aspen
institute.org/publications/the-brain-basis-for-integrated-social-emotional-
and-academic-development/
• A new edition of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School
was published in 2018 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engi-
neering, and Medicine. The new edition, How People Learn II: Learners,
Contexts, and Cultures, has a focus on emotions and culture in learn-
ing. For access to the new edition, go to: www.nap.edu/catalog/24783/
how-people-learn-ii-learners-contexts-and-cultures
 Understanding Emotional Thought 263
• School of the Future is a NOVA program produced in 2016 that docu-
ments how current knowledge in the learning sciences and best practices
in select schools provide insights into how we can improve education
(Bertelsen & Teeling [Producers], 2016). To view the program visit: www.
pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/school-of-the-future.html
• Readers may wish to join the International Mind, Brain and Education
Society, an interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners
from around the world that publishes a journal and holds biannual confer-
ences. https://imbes.org/
• For those interested in reading more broadly about affective neurosci-
ence, Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human
Brain is a foundational work. He explains how neuroscience has led us to
understand that affect and cognition are entwined.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 2017 book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life
of the Brain, is an accessible read for those wishing to understand better
what emotions are, how they manifest in our brains and bodies, and how
we can harness the science of emotion to address a range of societal chal-
lenges, including challenges related to youth.

Acknowledgements
Support was provided by NSF CAREER 11519520 and a Spencer Founda-
tion Mid-Career to Fellowship to MHIY; NSF GRFP Fellowship to RG, USC
Provost’s Research and Teaching Fellowship to RG.

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