 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama Spinoza, and this is a video on emotion and cognition. Today, we're going to look at this relationship between thinking and feeling, and what is the role of affect play in intelligence. We'll start by looking at some key definitions, where we'll look at the history of how this has been studied over the centuries, and then we're going to take a big look at understanding why this is so important. Here in schools, we usually think about, well, learning content area knowledge. Well, that's not the only game in town these days. These soft skills, 21st century skills, understanding how kids develop and learn how to be more empathetic or in solidarity with others, is also a key part of school learning these days. We'll look at some key theories of emotions and also consider the idea that there may be universal emotions, which are quite easy to detect on people's faces, for example, but there are other things that are also a lot more subtle. So here's a wonderful quote from Aristotle, anyone can get mad. This is simple. But getting mad at the right person, in the right degree, at the most opportune moment, with the correct goal in mind, that certainly is not easy. We'll talk about this a little bit more when we get into emotional intelligence. But the main idea here is that emotions are something that seem to sometimes overwhelm us and drive us. And that makes sense because the word itself means to move, to induce action. Emotion means that that induces action. And the key point for differentiation here that we want to emphasize is that emotions are not the same as feelings. Antonio de Maso is probably one of the most influential researchers in this area has made it really clear that emotions are of the body. That's really that uncontrollable thing that happens in your brain that triggers certain chemicals that lead to certain physical sensations that you might have. The feeling that you have about that is something you process and is much more at a psychological level. This is why some people, through types of therapy, for example, you know, you might have this urge, this impulse, because you have an emotional trigger for something. But you can train yourself to feel differently about that. For example, I perceive this not in my stomach. I can either decide that I'm going to go into a panic attack or I can sort of decide, OK, I'm going to embrace that and now I'm going to react differently. So there's a difference here between emotions and feelings. Emotions are reactions to external stimuli and more automatic while feelings are what is conditioned. What's so interesting, though, is that they have this really tight relationship, right, because emotions are reactions to what happens in the outside world. But also you can have a new emotional reaction to the feeling you generate. OK, so that's kind of complex. But basically, the idea here is to distinguish that emotions and feelings are different things. And if you'd like to see a great video on the topic, you can look around Tony Odomacio's emotional competence video. Really worthwhile watch. So now we have this balancing act between emotions and what is cognition. And we tend to think of cognition as being the sum of things that are like intelligence, right? So the word intelligence is, you know, the one who knows how to choose. Now, isn't that fascinating? So cognition ends up being highly linked to decision making aspects of mental activity. So other definitions include things like the ability to understand and the ability to resolve problems. So this is basically, well, if somebody is intelligent, I can see that they are able to resolve problems, right? This would be sort of the evidence that you would accept that somebody is intelligent. What we know is that intelligence is highly related to perception, how you perceive the world, as well as to memory systems, as well as to attention systems. So many people think that, OK, the signs of intelligence are the ability to reason, plan, resolve problems, think abstractly, learn from experience. And I particularly like that element there of learning from experience, because this is basically telling us that a key sign of intelligence, even though somebody might not be academic, book smart, if they're able to learn from their environment and do better the next time, that is also considered intelligence, right? Now, the key and interesting and fascinating element of intelligence like everything else that's a tenant has to do with this aspect of human variability. Humans differ in their abilities to understand complex ideas, to adapt to their environment. They have different ways of reasoning things or overcoming obstacles. And much of this is due to what is inherited and how that's potentiated by your environment. And something really key to this idea of intelligence, which we were able to appreciate a lot more through Howard Gardner's recommendations in 1983, is that it's not just a single element. You're either not, it's not binary. It's not you're smart or not smart. It's that they can be multiple intelligences. So you might be considered somebody who's highly intelligent in certain contexts, but not intelligent in other contexts, right? So this means that while we strive to find ways to sort of measure whether or not, you know, cognitive ability is when maximized and a person is intelligent or not, much of this measurement is relative to what we think is important for the context in which that person is learning that new competency. So we think of intelligence. We also think of, you know, adaptability to environment, your ability to learn or comprehend or create or identify various forms of reasoning, understand, memorize, to think, perception, plan, reason, your ability to reflect or resolve and to know. And this gets back to this idea of choosing and decision making that we mentioned before. So let's look at a brief history of this link between emotions and cognition. And also looking at this idea of emotional intelligence, which was sort of this bridge that was drawn between these two fields that had been studied very separately earlier on. Maybe Darwin was probably one of the first people to talk about this idea, the expressions of emotion in man and animals, which was written in 1868. And Thurndike in 1920 developed this idea of intelligence and its uses and identified there that it wasn't just intelligence itself, but part of being intelligent was also this managing or self-regulation that also related to emotions. And Walsher of the famous intelligence test rate was one of the first to consider non-intelligence factors that influenced intelligent behavior, including things like emotions. And then Neumann in 1966 was probably the very first person to have mentioned or used in academic literature this term of emotional intelligence in 1966. But this really took off when Gardner proposes ideas of intelligence. There was attention drawn to this aspect, whereas emotion then, because his model didn't include this. And shortly thereafter, Pains doctoral thesis was probably the first to ever mention a study of emotions, the development of emotional intelligence. So this is something could actually be taught and learned similar to other cognitive abilities. In 1989, Greenspan offered one of the first models of how emotional intelligence should look, but probably the biggest impulse to this field was given by Salove and Meyer, who did a lot of initial work, but probably one of their most famous publications is emotional development and emotional intelligence. But this, of course, was written up very successfully for the common reader, and Dana Goldman spoke on emotional intelligence. These earlier works spurred on then some very sophisticated approaches to trying to understand how to measure emotional intelligence, which came from Barron's work, which actually sought to measure how well this bridge occurred between emotion and cognition. So if I were to ask you a really quick question, true or false, reasoning and decision making can be divorced from emotions. And in doing so, people make better decisions. You've probably been told that a lot, right? You know, keep a cool head, or go and breathe for a while, think about things. The idea, though, is a little bit crazy, because physiologically speaking, it's actually impossible for that to happen. We know that emotions are critical to decision making, and all new perception is going to pass through these filters of emotional memories before they are processed at a cognitive level. This is kind of illustrated here. How do you learn about your world? Well, number one, things enter into your brain through sensory perception, through the way you perceive the world, right? Physiologically speaking, that's sensory perception. But the sensory input enters in up through the brainstem. And basically, one of the first stops that it makes, these signals will make after it enters in through your body, follows up, spinal cord hits the base of your brain, and basically the first check is through the amygdala, which helps in emotional memory processing, in the limbic system. Then it sort of bounces really quickly up towards a frontal lobe and returns back to the hippocampus and basically has this confirmation of whatever the emotional interpretation was first. So we know that sensory perception, that just the way that we perceive our world would make it impossible that you could make any decision without emotion, just because that's the first filter it will pass through. So we know that emotions and cognition are mutually influential. And going back to this huge point of human variability, not all of the same stimuli result in the same affective state for all people. Sometimes people see a clown and they laugh like crazy. And sometimes people see a clown and they freak out, right? So we know that based on personal experiences with information and how you've grown up in life, that influences the way you react to new stimuli. So the big question for teachers then is how does all of this influence classroom learning? And one of the things that might be really helpful to teachers in understanding how to manage the emotions in their classrooms in order to achieve the highest level of cognition possible is to maybe perhaps understand how emotions and cognitions are actually bridged by different types of networks in the brain. So it's not that your brain is all set to do just cognition or just emotion. They're doing these things in parallel, right? But it's in understanding where these crossover areas occur that would really facilitate a better understanding by teachers of what's going on in their classrooms. So we know that similar neurotransmitters, for example, are related to things like cognition and emotion. But their overlap area is what's really key here. This is where you can really take advantage of the mind-brain education science because at a neurobiological level, you can understand where there's this crossover level. Maybe at a psychological level, you can also talk about a certain basic cognitive level thinking. People always talk about this very oversimplified model of this actually happens at the neocortex level, right? And then it goes down and these raw emotions are down at the subcortical level in the limbic system or whatever. What's very interesting about this is this interaction, this interplay there between these different levels and where is it then that we find this very sweet spot of learning? So we can go from the molecular level down to the psychological concept but to understand what happens in our classrooms, we can be nurtured by these other information that would help us give a better understanding of how we should not treat emotions so differently from cognition. They're actually complementary and sometimes overlapping systems in the brain. And something really important to remember, now understanding a teeny bit more about this aspect of neurophysiological changes related to emotions and to cognition and going back to this idea that we had about habituated behaviors is that unfortunately emotional reactions to things can also be habituated over time. So we know that little kids can basically as newborns can imitate the faces that are around them. This is part of human survival, is learning to sort of imitate your environment. But what's really super sad is that abused children respond disproportionately to angry facial expressions because they sort of see, okay, this type of a face is gonna lead to this kind of an action or whatever it is. So we know that these things are also developed very early in life, which makes them very hard to unlearn later on in life. Of course they can be, but this is something that's much harder than just having the good, safe environment to begin with. Now if you recall, we talked a lot about how the definition of intelligence hinged on things like decision-making. Well, emotions are very influential in decision-making. In fact, there is no decision-making without an emotion. It doesn't matter how small it is, what shoes you put on this morning or to drop a nuclear bomb, basically all decisions are driven by emotions. And it's also very clear that negative emotions and stress can impede new learning. If you recall the explanation about the neurotransmitters, a key reason that this is true or key evidence behind this is that when you're in a highly negative emotional state, for example, stress, the chemicals that are released in your brain will impede other chemicals that are needed to actually make those new synaptic connections in your brain. And we know that having those highly negative emotional states is not compatible with learning at all. And we'll talk more about that when we look at stress in the next video. But not only is it chemicals, it's also the physical neural networks that link emotional processing in the brain that are also important. And this came to light with this wonderful and very classic study of Phineas Gage. Of course, not wonderful in the sense that he had a rod that plowed through his head, but because we learned so much from this particular case. Phineas Gage was this Robo worker who accidentally, he had this tapping rod, this metal rod. And this tapping rod actually hit dynamite, I think it was. And this rod shot up through his cheek and out through the top of his head. Now what's fascinating about this is, well, number one, the guy lived. Okay, that was pretty amazing, right? But aside from living, before he was this really cool, nice, affable guy who got on with a lot of people, no problems, right? But after he lost this particular network in the brain, he did not have the same perception of emotional states. Phineas, do you care if you work the night shift or the morning shift? Phineas, what do you think about whatever? No emotions, no opinions, no feelings about anything that he was experiencing. So this leads to this really fascinating hypothesis that your inability to have these emotions changes your ability to make decisions. Therefore, you are not able to learn other things as well. So not only was his personality changed and his emotional state changed, but the emotions drove the decision-making which draves the cognition. So you might consider, you know, that decision-making is maybe the bridge then between the emotions and the cognition as well. There are other modern-day Phineas gauges, which is kind of tragic, but people who have strokes in similar areas that Phineas gauge lost show a similar visible attribute which offers some evidence that there's certain neural pathways that need to be structured in order for this link between emotional states and cognition to function correctly in which, unfortunately, these people's cases it doesn't. So now let's turn to just a handful of theories of emotions because I'd like to hear your own theories. Different theories back in the 1800s proposed different types of things. The James Lang theory, for example, proposed that something happened. This created an emotional state based on the triggers of different chemicals in your brain, these neurotransmitters. Your brain interprets this. That's the feeling you have about it and therefore you experience an emotion. Now that's kind of been challenged, right? Because Ken and Bard then said, oh, no, no, no. The event happens and it's simultaneous that you will be aroused and the emotion is the arousal. Interesting, right? But Satcher and Singer thought, well, no, you have the event, then you're aroused, you think about it and therefore you experience an emotion. So anyways, lots of different theories out there and a lot of them seem to hold water, right? You have the stimulus, this wild dog is barking at you, right? So one thought is, well, I think, oh, I'm scared, I'm gonna run away. Well, that's not really what seems to happen. That conscious processing, you react before you're conscious of that reaction, right? So this is why these other theories had so much credence, right? So the James Lang theory, okay, so you get the stimulus, you have this automatic arousal, then you figure out what you're feeling about it. Oh, I interpret that as being fear, okay? Cannon Bart sort of complicates this because he says, no, no, it's split second, it's so fast that these are actually happening at the same time. So the dog barks, the rain releases certain chemicals, you know, adrenaline round, okay? And at the same time, as you begin to run away, you are acknowledging that you're fearful. In Satcher's ideas, this very common sense idea that, okay, you have the stimulus, you are aroused, you assess the situation, and then you have fear. So very subtle differences here in the theories because they really are measuring milliseconds of reaction time. Because the emotion of fear, for example, it's self-preservation. When we get together, I really wanna pull this one apart and see what you guys think your own theory is of emotion and how they're really triggered. And then I want you to add on an additional piece to this. Once you think you know how emotions are generated, how does that change cognition? And to make things even more complicated, because this has to do with this dynamic situation. It's not that, you know, something happens and in parallel, right? But this general idea that you're gonna have a physiological stimulus, you're going to react physically, right? You're gonna have that release in your brain. The chemical will release in your brain telling you what to do. You're gonna feel in love and wanna cuddle, or you're gonna feel panic and wanna run, whatever it is. You will act some way based on this chemical release. But that in turn interacts with your environment to give you an additional emotion and a reappraisal of what you were feeling initially, okay? So there is this dynamic process of your interaction with the environment, what happens to your body, your interpretation of what's going on there, and then the new reaction to the old feeling. So all of those things are gonna be combined. Let's talk about that a little bit more when we get together. It's also really important to understand that emotions have not been nailed down yet. In fact, there have been numerous theories for hundreds of years in the literature. Plucic, who is somebody who's quite prolific in this area of trying to understand a theory of emotions, basically lays them out like opposites. He would say that the opposite of disapproval to optimism, you know, ecstasy to grief, loathing to admiration, rage and terror. And that these things have additional, more and more subtle versions of what they are. It's fascinating, but there is no one agreed upon model of ways to categorize emotions. Other people have tried to do this with colors along basic schemes of anger, joy, fear, sadness, love, okay, what are the difference, you know, overlap areas that those things might have as well. Takanishi has tried to do this sort of, you know, more three-dimensional vision of how we interact and how our physical states, for example, how well we slept can influence emotional states, right? So there's tons of theories out there, but the key takeaway is that there is no universally agreed upon theory of other emotional spectrum. However, when we get to the video on faces, we will talk about Paul Ekman's studies and his suggestion back in the 70s, which is really pretty much born out, born a lot of fruit over the past 50 years, shows that there are really only six universally perceived facial expressions equal to emotions that are shared. So that might give us some kind of a hint as to how we're gonna interpret emotions. Whether or not, you know, you just have this core, it's kind of like having the primary colors, right? You can make any color out of the mixture of those colors. Well, there are other theories that use Ekman's work as a base and say just spreading out from those core emotions, then you might have these other subtle emotions. A huge takeaway point then in understanding this link between emotions and cognition is understanding that they are mutually influential, which means that the cultivation of emotional intelligence in children is actually something that's very beneficial to cognition later in life. This ability to self-control, to make the right decisions, is something that's very key in helping kids develop emotional intelligence. Some of the very basic things that are recommended is helping kids label their emotions. You can't control something unless you know what it is. So being able to tell a kid something like, I know you're feeling mad because, you know, Susie took the ball from you. Number one, labeling the emotion, but then also second, understanding the cause and effect. You have that sensation inside your gut because this action occurred. So sort of helping a kid draw a parallel between what happens in the environment and what they're experiencing in their bodies is very important. But then the final point related to emotional intelligence is very key is how do we develop them, that empathy? It's basically what you can sense the other person can feel too. So now think about it, you know, I bet Sally's really sad and she's probably also angry because you hit her, right? Okay, so how would you feel if you were the one who were hit, right? And sort of helping the child develop this understanding? Number one, label it. Number two, what caused it? Number three, how can I cultivate some kind of a lesson from that? Maybe the empathy that I could help children develop based on that experience. So to sort of summarize this whole idea of emotional intelligence, we see that it's made up of a lot of different pieces and different theories will sort of give it different labels, but they all have to do with two different levels of thinking. One is this inside of me kind of a vision and the other is understanding the other. So those are two different ways to approach this. And perhaps the KISS model, you know, the keep it simple stupid model, the most simplistic vision of this is looking at this with just two pairs of concepts, right? One is the self and the rest of the world, right? And the other level is can I label it? Can I understand it? And then can I manage it? Can I regulate it? And this is basically the most simple aspect. This means that, for example, little kids have to become more self aware. This is why we say, can you label that emotion? Do you know what caused it, right? Once they can do that, then they are able to then also to see the emotions in others. They can understand, well, that person looks sad or happy or whatever. That's when they can start to have those roots of empathy, right? But then once they've recognized it in themselves, I feel angry, they can move on to that next step of self management. Okay, so now what does that mean? Can I manage my own emotions? How will I react? When I'm mad, I'm going to do whatever. How do I choose what I'm gonna do? But the highest level of this emotional intelligence is sort of being able to understand what's happening in the outside world and then manage the emotions of others. Can you understand what others are going through or feeling or sensing? And then can you do something about that? That would be the highest level of emotional intelligence, being an inspirational leader, being somebody who is a callous change in a positive way. Get people to work as teens. Is that something that you're able to do? Now that would be the highest level of emotional intelligence. So this is the most simple model. Many people are very aware of Donald Goldman's model that talks about self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, empathy, motivation that can lead to this superior decision-making. So again, this idea of connecting emotions to a decision-making. And other researchers, Francis and Barnard, for example, expand on this KISS model and try to give more complex definitions of each of these different aspects. For example, in self-awareness, you're able to accurately have a clear self-perception. And from that can be born self-confidence. So they go into the elaboration of what the benefits are of actually mastering each of these different levels of interaction. And going back to Salve's model that we mentioned before, very, very similar to all of the different things we've talked about. They had four different aspects. One is to be able to perceive the information. One is to use the information about emotions to your benefit, right? Understand the emotions of others and manage them. Basically, we're saying the same thing over and over again in these theories of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, or being able to understand the others and social skills. And some have elaborated these models to extend to the benefits, the broader impacts that well-developed emotional intelligence can have on learning outcome. And if you look at all of these things, self-perception, decision-making, all of those things also have a direct influence on your ability to have better cognitive functions overall. There are, however, and this is like big red flag, there's a lot of things out on the market, sort of telling people they can measure their emotional intelligence. It'd be amazing if we had such a tool right now, but right now a lot of the things are kind of in, still, you know, initial stages of sort of testing because as we mentioned before, the key factor here is that not all people react to the same situation in the same way. And just multiple-choice tests about how do you think you'd react to whatever, whatever is not a true representation of your level of emotional intelligence. So sort of be careful about those things that are out there right now. There's other tests that, for example, Celeve and Meyer and colleagues, which actually show this really higher complexity of measuring emotion, which is very much tied to measuring intelligence. And so this ends up being a really much more complete vision of this, but it's a lot more complicated. And so many people sort of steer away from understanding this. Another quite sophisticated model, the Barron Emotional Quotent Test, again, super thorough. The difficulty is interpreting the indicators to be observable behavior. So in an intrapersonal understanding, do I have a sense of self-regard to accurately perceive, understand, and accept oneself? That's something I don't think we can measure on a multiple-choice test. So there's a lot of things that are wonderfully disaggregated in this model, but it does make it more difficult to measure because humans are complicated, and I guess that's okay, that's good. The Barron Test, for example, has 133 items. They're done in short sentences, so it's not a multiple choice. A lot of things have to do with a Likert scale, so you don't have to say yes or no to things. You can say on a scale of things. And they recommend, they say it can be used for anybody more or less, 17 years of age, more or less. It takes under an hour to do. So there are some advances in the ways we can think about measuring emotional intelligence, but really, hard to say that anybody has really nailed it yet. In measuring emotional intelligence, many people talk about the Marshmallow Test, which is really, really interesting because it was not designed to be a test of emotion in general. It was only meant to be a test of delayed gratification. Could you have enough self-control that you could then postpone gratification? And for those of you who've seen this test, it's a real kick. It's basically, you watch all these three and four-year-olds, they're given a marshmallow and they're told, I'm gonna walk out of the room. And when I come back, if you can wait until I come back, I'll bring you two marshmallows. And so you get about a third of the kids do everything possible not to eat the marshmallow because they're able to delay gratification. Then you get about a third of the kids who just like eat it no matter what, right? Just the guy walks out, even before they're out of the room, they've already eaten it, right? And then you also get a third of the kids, more or less, who try super hard and maybe just pick a little piece off. They try their best, but they're not able to resist it completely. So Michelle began this work in the 70s and he's just written another book in 2015, I believe it was, to sort of sum up what have we learned from almost 50 years of delayed gratification. And what does this tell us about self-regulation and then again about emotional regulation? At the end of the day, what he says, you know, follow up with some of these kids and you don't find a whole lot of difference in their educational level or their income levels, but you do find very interesting enough a difference in their self-satisfaction level, which is really kind of weird, right? Turns out that people who can delay gratification sort of think, well, okay, wasn't my time right now, maybe next time. There's a lower level of stress, which could definitely have some benefits later on. And we'll talk more about that when we look at stress in the next video. Okay, last definition that I didn't mention earlier because it's just so rare, but it emphasizes certain neural networks, so I think I'll bring it in anyways. Alexithemia is a deficiency in processing and describing emotions. It's basically being tongue-tied only for emotional states. It's a difficulty in identifying, distinguishing feelings and body sensation. There's just no interpretation there of all the things that are going on there. And initially, like almost everything, we think it's psychological. But now you can find the neurological basis of Alexithemia, which is fascinating, which shows that there is also a distinct processing between how we articulate emotional content words versus other types of words. So just thought I'd throw that in there just as another angle there to how complex it is to process emotions in the brain. So with that, I say thank you. Looking forward to seeing you in class.