The Emotions of Learning for Children and Adolescents

by Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

Joy, interest, excitement, surprise and astonishment are essential emotions that motivate a child or adolescent to learn, empowering them to flourish and to grow. These positive emotions bring pleasantness, anticipation and creativity to learning situations in the home and in school. They signal when a child or adolescent's potentials or goals are being nurtured, supported, stimulated, confirmed and cherished. In such an emotionally pleasant environment, learning is encouraged and sustained.

Conditions for learning that hinder motivation are characterized by fear and anger. These negative emotions may come from experiences of wounding to a child or adolescent's self-esteem because of overly harsh evaluation or the blocking of their potentials or goals. Fear and anger alert children or adolescents to the presence of danger to their physical self or to their self-esteem. Learning does not flourish in an environment in which children and adolescents are too angry to listen or too afraid to take risks, such as pursuing unusual ideas or asking for help.

Emotions provide direction and images of expression to cognition (thinking), sensation (the body), and intuition (hunches). The emotions are expressed according to the development of the child and the emotional display rules of the child's family. In any particular family, some emotions may be acceptable to express and to share, whereas exhibiting certain other emotions is not allowed. Unacceptable emotions may be denied or they may become unconscious. For example, as an infant, a child may express joy, interest, fear and anger, but when he or she becomes teenager they may only show fear and anger because of being raised in an abusive family and experiencing failure with peers. In other families the voicing of anger may not be allowed and as the child grows into adulthood their unexpressed rage can wreak havoc from the shadows of the unconscious.

Joy

Joy is a contagious emotion that makes children and adolescents interested and excited about learning. In a school or home environment, the emotion of joy evokes the desire to learn because it makes the child or teen feel like they belong and joy raises their self-esteem. Joy promotes social bonding with parents, teachers and peers as it gives the message that the young person's potential contributions and self-worth are important in the family and the classroom. The pleasurable experience of joy gives rise to feelings of familiarity and provides encouragement to learn by increasing the enjoyment of learning activities.

Joy provokes a child or adolescent's interest in learning what their family has to teach them about life. It makes the family members feel good that their home is a trustworthy place to be intimate and a safe place to share ideas, feelings and love. Joy promotes sibling bonding in the family and peer cooperation in the school. In the classroom, joyfulness tells the children that their teacher likes them, that they are valuable and that they are safe to risk asking questions and expressing their own ideas and values in their school.

Interest and excitement

The emotions of interest and excitement, bring novelty, difference and expectancy to the family and classroom. Children and adolescent learning thrives on the excitement that can be tasted when one is presented with something interesting, different and new. Allowing for novelty gives the message that children and adolescents can express their own uniqueness and personal differences. The family or classroom that does not allow for difference, novelty and an expectancy of something interesting and exciting to explore, will not promote the conditions of learning that children and adolescents need in order to grow emotionally and mentally. When a child or adolescent's interest is stimulated, it has a calming effect and they can focus more intently and their attention becomes more concentrated. This very important aspect of the experience of interest is valuable in understanding the needs of hyperactive or impulsive young people for personally interesting environments in order for them to learn and to function successfully.

Interest and excitement generate a climate of creativity and stimulation that opens the sensory system, the mind and the heart with receptivity to learning. Children and adolescents enjoy working with computers because of the abundance and availability of new information and the freedom to pursue their own interests and excitement. Parents and teachers can use the computer and television in a creative fashion to promote learning by showing interest in what their children and adolescents are doing on the computer and what they are viewing on the television. Being interactive and present for the children and adolescents will help parents and teachers make these technologies an asset to growth. The inherent receptivity of interest and excitement promotes love and intimacy with family members and aids investigation, discovery and bonding with peers in the school.

Surprise and astonishment

Surprise and astonishment are emotions that create breakthroughs in familiarity and produce a perception of novelty. These experiences disturb familiar expectancy and serve to open the mind, heart and body for the unexpected and the new. It can be said that surprise and astonishment "open the pores," bringing a readiness in the child or adolescent for a fresh experience of learning. Astonishment promotes a sense of wonder and feelings of breakthrough that leave the child or adolescent's mind blank in a moment of newness-the element of amazement that surprise and shock can bring to the situation of learning.

The family or classroom that uses creativity to parent or teach is a pleasant place in which to learn, grow, love and cooperate. Creative parents or teachers present the familiar in new ways that give rise to excitement and interest by breaking down boredom and revealing the amazement that life can offer things worth learning. Creative teaching utilizes surprise and shock to create an interesting learning environment that disturbs regular patterns of perceptions and offers new ways to look at things. A creative approach to parenting can make a child or adolescent feel like their home is a place to which they want to return and where they can enjoy being with their family.

Surprise and astonishment make a child or adolescent sense their vulnerability, and these emotions can quickly create fear and defensiveness. This is why the family and school must feel safe. The sureness of emotional safety provides a container in which the child or adolescent can be vulnerable enough to experience the surprise, astonishment and wonder that lead to new creative perceptions of problems and reality.

Conclusion

Different developmental stages influence the way children and adolescents use their sensation/body, thinking/cognition and intuition/hunches to experience the emotions of joy, interest, excitement, surprise and astonishment. The influence of the emotions is experienced from the cradle to the grave. Emotions are more than irrational gut reactions to the events of human life. They are the main core elements that organize a person's personality (Malatesta, 1984 & 1990). Often parents can tell within a few moments after birth that a particular infant is different from the other siblings in the family. Each child or adolescent's emotional temperament will influence the way parents, teachers and peers react to them.

The culture, family, parents, teachers and peers shape the quality of emotional experiences in an interaction with the emotional temperament of the individual child or adolescent. They are influences that teach children and adolescents how and when to express particular emotions. Human emotional life is partially socially constructed and partially a function of one's genetic and archetypal inheritance. Specific, or discrete, emotions and the interactions between emotions influence motivation (Izard, 1977 & 1991). Emotions form the undercurrents and rising tides of human life, sometimes exploding into passionate displays, sometimes oozing up from the muddy depths. They are the life force, the creative waters, from which learning, expression and production of new ideas and solutions to critical social, environmental and personal problems can come forth with joy and exuberance.

References

Izard, C. E. (1991) The Psychology of Emotions. NY: Plenum Press.

Malatesta, C. Z. (1988). The Role of Emotions in the Development and Organization of Personality. In R. Dienstbier & R. A. Thompson (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1988 (pp. 1-56). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.