New Research on Emotional Regulation and Academic Achievement

A new study was recently published that broadens our understanding of how emotions relate to academic achievement. It’s old news that emotions play a role in students’ achievement and school functioning, but this study uses a different lens by looking specifically at emotional regulation rather than simply positive or negative feelings in students.

Here at The Yellin Center, we see a lot of students who are having trouble regulating their feelings and their behaviors. This incredibly complex skill is not often taught explicitly; rather, we learn it by observing others and experimenting with our actions over the years. Kwon, Hanrahan, and Kupzyk, the authors of the 2017 study, looked at how emotional expression and emotional regulation related to academic functioning. Emotional regulation is your ability to effectively process incoming emotions and modulate how you handle them and how you express them. It is very closely related to attention and behavioral regulation – your ability to inhibit or engage in certain behaviors. Not surprisingly, behavioral regulation is a common concern in classrooms, especially for students who have difficulty paying attention. The combination of attentional control, behavioral regulation, and emotional regulation can be called effortful control.

Prior research has already set the stage for the importance of effortful control and emotional regulation in younger students; the current study took it further by looking at older elementary students. Effortful control in our youngest students – preschoolers – is positively related to early literacy skills. In other words, young children who are more capable of processing their emotions and regulating themselves have higher literacy skills. Kindergartners with higher emotional regulation skills have higher literacy and math skills. Elementary students with better emotional regulation were more able to attend to academic tasks. This isn’t surprising, considering how easy it is for our emotions to take up a lot of our limited brain space, or attention, and distract us from tasks.

The newest data support the notion that emotional regulation affects academic engagement which, in turn, affects academic functioning (e.g., achievement on standardized tests, teacher ratings of engagement). The authors point out that our emotions affect how well we are able to “allocate and utilize cognitive resources and skills” including those necessary for learning. Poor regulation of emotions, wherein our feelings may flood our mind, could lead to avoidance of academic tasks.

There are two important implications of this research. First, it reminds us that just as negative emotions and poor emotional regulation might affect achievement in a negative way, positive emotions and effective regulation are actually related to higher achievement. This means that rather than always placing a focus on targeting students with poor emotionality and trying to decrease sadness or anger, we should also remember to invest some resources into increasing happiness and exuberance. Second, it may be beneficial to directly teach students the skills necessary for effective effortful control, including emotional regulation. While many students develop these skills independently, there are many others who experience significant difficulty in school because they are expected to be able to control their behaviors, attention, and emotional expression without ever having been explicitly taught how to do so, and without being given room to practice without facing negative consequences.


Source:
Kwon, K., Hanrahan, A.R., & Kupzyk, K.A. (2017). Emotional expressivity and emotion regulating: Relation to academic functioning among elementary school children. School Psychology Quarterly, 32(1), 75-88.

How Emotions Are Made

In the traditional view of emotion, emotions are their own entities, with their own essences, which can be found somewhere in the brain and which manifest in particular expressions we can all recognize.

In How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, a fascinating book by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, the author presents a research-supported paradigm shift. Emotions are not inborn things to be found; they are made. Just like any thoughts or perceptions, emotions are constructed, and variability is the norm.

Our brains are actively participating in our realities, imposing meaning on stimuli rather than simply receiving meaning from the world around us and/or the physical sensations within us. In other words, we see what we believe, rather than believe what we see. If the brain were merely reactive, it would require too many interconnections to be metabolically efficient and keep us alive. It is advantageous for the brain to represent information utilizing as few neurons as possible. It does this by separating statistical similarities from differences and categorizing a set of experiences in a concept, as a kind of shorthand, to provide meaning and inform action.

An emotional category such as “Anger” is merely a concept that we use, with the aid of language and a probabilistic assessment of past experiences, to understand a variety of experiences in the present. Just as our concepts of color guide us to see only seven colors of the rainbow despite the many frequencies within each color category, we recognize emotions only as much as our constructed concepts allow. These concepts are basically our best guesses at what is going on in any particular moment, so that we can figure out how to deal with it to stay alive and well.

Because the body is just another part of the world that the brain must explain, our emotions may be telling us as much about what is going on within us as much as what is going on around us. With our limited amount of energy resources, the brain must constantly use past experience to predict the body’s need for these resources, and to budget accordingly. When the budget is unbalanced, the state of that budget is felt, prompting the brain to search for explanations. This may then be conceptualized as an emotional experience. Misinterpreting the reason for a bad feeling can lead to mistakes. For example, judges are more likely to deny parole for hearings that occur just before lunchtime.

The author makes some recommendations for keeping your body budget as balanced as possible, i.e., with a solid foundation so the budget is easier to maintain and to keep you feeling generally well. The suggestions include:

• Exercise (Consider yoga, which includes a beneficial combination of physical activity and slow-paced breathing)

• Engage with books, movies, or other forms of storytelling (Involvement with others’ stories helps to avoid rumination)

• Eat healthy foods

• Get a good amount of sleep

• Surround yourself with greenery and natural light

• Practice giving and gratitude

With emotional well being so closely tied to success in school and in life, and with emotions so inextricably linked to our physical states, it is wise to take good care of our bodies and minds, and to tend closely to the emotions we construct.

The Emotional Toll of Dyslexia

If you’ve been following the posts in this month-long series on dyslexia, you know by now that people with dyslexia are bright and creative, that they can achieve excellent outcomes with the right instruction, and that there are plenty of great tools to help readers and writers with dyslexia navigate the challenges of literacy. All of this sounds optimistic - and it should. But parents and educators should be aware that students with dyslexia may suffer from low self-esteem and feelings of anxiety, sadness, anger, and frustration related to their academic challenges.

Feedback from their teachers, even the most well-meaning, can be discouraging for children with dyslexia. Because of the types of errors they tend to make, particularly in spelling, dyslexic children are often told to try harder or pay more attention. Their errors may be labeled as “careless” or “lazy.”  Some teachers, confronted with an obviously intelligent student who is making the simplest of errors, assume she just isn’t trying. In fact, many children with dyslexia are some of the hardest workers in their classes, so being misunderstood as careless can be especially frustrating.

It may also be emotionally trying for students with dyslexia to see their classmates learning to read and spell with an ease that is difficult to understand. As children develop proficiency with reading, they are often asked to read aloud in front of the class, placed in leveled reading groups, or sent to the library with their classmates to check out books. All of these scenarios could be uncomfortable for a  child with dyslexia, especially one who has not received a diagnosis. All she knows is that she is in the lowest reading group and that she struggles with the easiest books while her classmates are graduating to chapter books.

Social struggles can continue outside academics, too. Some individuals with dyslexia struggle with language-even oral language-and may not understand complex social scripts. Some also have difficulty understanding sequencing, making blindingly fast social interactions governed by cause-and-effect relationships seem bewildering. Finding the right words is another language-based challenge that impacts people with dyslexia, so even if a child understands what is being discussed, the process of adding his insight can be frustrating. An additional hurdle, more relevant now than in the past, is the constant presence of text in young people’s social worlds. Rather than chatting on the phone, a majority of kids socialize via text messages and social media platforms, which can make it tough for  kids with dyslexia to follow what’s going on with their friends and add their own contributions.

One of the best things that can happen to a child (or adult!) with dyslexia is a diagnosis of dyslexia from someone who can help him understand what this disability really is. He must be shown, over and over again, the difference between the kind of rote learning that his brain doesn’t master as easily and the kind of high-level thinking at which he excels.

Children with dyslexia need opportunities to feel successful, whether or not these occur in the classroom. Sports and the arts have been critical confidence-boosters for innumerable students with learning challenges. Volunteer opportunities, particularly those in which they can play a leadership role, are also excellent places for young people with dyslexia to build feelings of success and self-efficacy.

Finally, kids have trouble appreciating that things tend to get markedly easier for people with dyslexia once they finish school. School has made up an enormous part of their life experience for about as long as they can remember, and it’s hard to imagine that there’s any other system. Luckily, there is. The real world is kinder and more accommodating than school often is, and there are a variety of ways to build and measure success rather than a single report card.

photo credit: Redd Angelo

Considering Emotions in the Classroom

It’s been almost 100 years since Pavlov, one of the earliest behavioral psychologists, set the precedent of linking learning with positive emotions. We learn better when we’re engaged and feeling good. It’s only in the last decade or two, however, that schools have started to take emotions seriously by implementing school-wide programs. There’s no shortage of research out there reminding us that unhappy kids are going to have a lot of trouble learning, but newer research has started focusing on positive emotions as well. Here at The Yellin Center, we see a lot of students who are feeling down or frustrated, often because they haven’t gotten the academic support they need in order to feel successful. Thankfully, lots of researchers have begun looking at how we can help students experience more positive emotions and, more importantly, learn how to identify, accept, and respond to the emotions they feel.

From kindergarten to college, we see a relationship between emotions or mood and grades or achievement. We also know that students with lower moods perceive themselves as less competent. It would be impossible to run a study looking at the directionality of these relationships, but it’s clear that negative moods, lower achievement, and feelings of incompetence are linked, regardless of what causes what. Parents and teachers want students to feel good about their work and to be engaged in the learning process. Feeling anxious, sad, or angry can get in the way of academic engagement. According to one theory, the “Broaden and Build Model” (Fredrickson, 2001), positive emotions broaden our mind, allow us to explore more of our environment and make us more aware of what’s going on. Negative emotions, on the other hand, have a narrowing effect; we are more likely to become fixated on a certain aspect of our environment and miss out on other details. Positive emotions might also increase our consciousness of potential solutions to problems – cognitive flexibility and strategy use, in other words. Way back in the early 1900’s, developmental psychologists already knew that feelings of joy lead to children’s desire to play and be creative – two very important mechanisms in the learning process, especially during early childhood (Vygotsky, 1978).

In our work, we know that before any academic interventions or strategies can be put in place, we need to focus on helping students feel their best so they’re ready to tackle whatever difficult learning comes their way. We’re especially happy to see researchers turning away from exploring negative emotions and towards testing out different school-based socioemotional interventions that can increase positive emotions, emotional regulation, and engagement. Two programs that have been gaining traction are socioemotional learning programs and mindfulness meditation. Socioemotional learning programs help students develop their emotional intelligence through a programmed sequence of lessons on self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. There are a number of commercially available curriculums that schools have the option of buying as packages, but lots of teachers are implementing socioemotional learning into their classrooms on their own, as well. One of the most important lessons for students is learning how to identify their feelings, respond to them appropriately, and develop a toolbox of coping strategies for moving to a more positive state, if necessary. This is an important set of skills to start working on before children even step foot in a classroom; it helps young learners face challenges, conflicts, and failures appropriately. Parents and caregivers can start introducing children to a robust emotional vocabulary and coping toolbox as soon as a baby starts to attend to the people around her or him.

A second intervention steadily gaining popularity is mindfulness meditation. According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the founding figures in the field, mindfulness is focused on learning how to be with your thoughts and feelings in a non-judgmental way and to selectively attend to them. It can help students recognize their emotions and learn how to cope with them effectively in order to make space for positivity and calm. Research looking into the effects of mindfulness meditation in the classroom has found increased self-regulation, attentional control, and prosocial behavior (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2010).

We’re excited to see over the next few years what research comes out about school-based interventions that take the whole child into account – that is, academics that also focus on helping students feel positively empowered to engage in learning by giving them the tools to not just solve math problems but also manage the wave of emotions within each of us. In the meantime, feel free to check out the resources listed below and talk to your child’s school about how your child is learning to be emotionally empowered.

References

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218-226.

Schonert-Reichl, K. A., & Lawlor, M. S. (2010). The effects of a mindfulness-based education program on pre-and early adolescents’ well-being and social and emotional competence. Mindfulness, 1(3), 137-151.

Resources and Further Reading

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Wherever you go, there you are (10th ed.). New York, NY: Hachette.

Snel, E. (2013). Sitting still like a frog. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications.

Blog: Why Social and Emotional Learning Is Essential for Students 

The Atlantic: The Psychological Approach to Educating Kids

Strategies for Promoting Self-Regulation in Children

We recently wrote about promoting mindfulness in children, which received a great deal of response and thanks from parents and teachers who were trying to address social and emotional learning with their children. They noted, however, that it has been hard for them to find tangible, effective ways to teach children skills like mindfulness and self-regulation. In response to their comments, we are going to dig a little deeper into self-regulation – the processes we use to calm ourselves down when feeling upset, angry, or overwhelmed or cheer ourselves up when feeling dejected or sad.

Social-Emotional Development and the Brain

Often, as parents or teachers, we think that children will be able to develop regulatory skills on their own. This is correct to some extent, as children do begin to develop self-soothing and self-regulatory abilities in infancy, and they continue to develop these over time. However, it can be hard for children to learn how to work through big, overwhelming feelings in a thoughtful, proactive manner. They often need to be explicitly be taught strategies for regulating their emotions and responses.

For more information, Dr. Shonkoff, Director, Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University gives a wonderful three-minute overview of the relationship between brain development, cognition, and emotional regulation in his video Brain Builders.

However, the salient question for many teachers and parents is how to translate all the information they know about the importance of fostering a child’s social-emotional development into fun and effective learning experiences. Luckily, we are here to help, and have outlined a few of our favorite resources and ideas for you below. 

Gross Motor Actives that Promote Self-Regulation

At The Yellin Center, we often recommend that students who are struggling with self-regulation or impulse control participate in gross motor actives that promote mind-body awareness. Examples of such activities are martial arts, ballet or yoga. A research study done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison supports this notion. Researchers looked at using a school based Tae Kwon Do training program to develop self-regulatory skills in students in kindergarten through fifth grade. They found that at the end of their three-month intervention the students in the martial arts program demonstrated greater improvements in “cognitive self-regulation, effective self-regulation, prosocial behavior, classroom conduct, and performance on a mental math test (Lakes & Hoyt, 2004).

Yoga is another activity that can help promote self-regulation in children. The children’s yoga and mindfulness program, Move with ME ™, provides video yoga classes to teach health and self-regulation skills to children through stories and pretend play. As children go through each video they will have fun pretending to be everything from a lion to a rocket ship. Beyond their yoga videos, Move with Me, also offers trainings, informative self-regulation activities, and other mindfulness curriculum materials. Best of all, Move with Me is constantly staying current on the latest research in social-emotional development in children and sharing that with their users.

Mind Up Curriculum

Scholastic has a curriculum called Mind Up that helps children “focus their attention, improve their self-regulation skills, build resilience to stress, and develop a positive mind-set in both school and life.” The lessons and curriculum are broken up by age group, and provide resources for children in grades kindergarten through eighth grade.

What we like best about the Mind Up curriculum is that it was created by neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, and educators who use the notion that knowing one’s own brain can empower students to learn complex skills and overcome challenges. When developing their instructional strategies they integrate the latest neuroscience research on how our brain works and how it impacts learning. Here at The Yellin Center, that is exactly what we do and believe in. By knowing how their brain works, and what parts of their brain control their actions, feelings, and learning, students are often better able to overcome their challenges. If you head over to the Scholastic Website you can download a sample lesson plan and excerpt from the program to determine if the materials would meet your needs.

References
Lakes, K. D., & Hoyt, W. T. (2004). Promoting self-regulation through school-based martial arts training. Applied Developmental Psychology, 25, 238-302.

Developing Emotional Literacy

When it comes to developing literacy skills, practice makes perfect. The more time children spend recognizing letters, sounding out words, and using spelling patterns in their writing, the more accomplished they become. It seems obvious that time working to develop reading and writing is time well spent; after all, literacy skills are essential for academic success. Less time, however, is devoted to helping kids master the skills that some experts refer to as “emotional literacy.”

Nearly everyone has had encounters with people who seem to be born with exceptional emotional literacy, or the ability to “read” others. Someone with strong emotional literacy skills seems to know just what to say in a tense situation. She usually excels in professions that require her to interact with, persuade, and lead others, like politics or sales. Socially, she’s enjoyable to be around. Children with strong emotional literacy tend to get along with adults and other kids alike. They can detect subtle emotional nuances conveyed by a slight shift in tone of voice or a fleeting expression.

There is evidence to suggest that an increase in screen time leads to a decrease in emotional literacy.

For example, a study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that sixth graders who attended an outdoor camp from which electronics were banned were much better at reading human emotions than peers from the same school who did not give up their devices. The really fascinating part is that the experimental group was without computers, smartphones, and tablets for only five days!

Just like standard literacy skills, emotional literacy (for most of us) can be perfected only through practice. And it’s difficulty to get that practice when social interactions take place via screens and are stripped of the facial expressions and voice modulations that accompany face-to-face communication. For many kids, then, it is essential to have opportunities for explicit practice. Here are a few ideas:

An obvious idea is to limit the use of devices—and we’re not just talking about kids’ use of devices, since young people will view their parents’ habits as the norm. Rather than designating certain areas of the house as device-free, try establishing only one or two small zones where phones and tablets are allowed; the expectation (for everyone) could be that these tools are not to be used in the rest of the house. If you try this idea, think about how the spot you pick for phone use might affect your family’s choices. The living room couch, for example, might encourage lots of screen time because it’s easy to sit there comfortably for hours.

Parents should model in-person communication wherever possible. Simply saying things like, “I think I’ll call Aunt Linda to discuss this; some conversations shouldn’t take place through email,” helps kids start to realize that the medium they use for communication is a choice.

Encourage young people to read fiction. Studies have demonstrated a strong connection between a person’s reading habits and his levels of empathy. Researchers believe the connection may be due to readers’ tendency to experience a character’s feelings almost firsthand.

Watch a new movie on mute. Using only the characters’ facial expressions and body language as clues, talk about what you think is happening in a scene and guess the characters’ relationships to each other. Then watch the scene with the sound turned up to see if you were right.

Spend time with toddlers or animals. Because babies and pets can’t talk, kids will have to rely on other cues to guess at what they think, feel, and want.

Travel. Taking kids to a different state, country, or even neighborhood or exotic restaurant helps them to realize that other people’s lives are not necessarily like their own. Talk about what is valued by another culture and analyze the differences and similarities kids observe. If there is a language barrier, so much the better; young people will be forced to rely on nonverbal signals to build understanding.

Books to Teach Social Skills

The Importance of Building Social Understanding

Developing social skills is a critical part of child development. However, it can be complicated to explain to students the importance and relevance of different behavior modifications in an engaging, meaningful way. As a classroom teacher, I often relied heavily on creative books to help set the stage and open a dialogue with students about behavior and behavior management. The following are a sampling of books that tackle multiple social areas that can be hard to explain to students. In my classroom, I always read social development stories in a whole class setting, and then engaged in a teacher directed discussion about the lesson behind each tale. Furthermore, having a framework of a story can be beneficial as a reference when giving students directives about the behaviors. For example, the story Decibella and her 6-inch Voice introduces a five-point voice scale to students, so often when I wanted to temper the vocal volume of student I would ask them where their voice was on the Decibella scale, and follow that prompt up with where it should be. It was a strong tool in helping manage the classroom environment, while also promoting behavioral self-monitoring in my students.

Book Recommendations

The Way I Feel by Janan Cain

Skill taught: Understanding and Expressing Emotions

Grades: Preschool through Third Grade

Summary: An excellent book, with beautiful illustrations to teach students about complex emotions such as pride, fear, pain, curiosity, anger and disappointment. The story also gives students a way to articulate the emotions they are feeling, and an understanding how one might act when feeling a particular way. The text uses bias-free language and vocabulary to give students a framework to express their feelings.

The Way I Act by Steve Metzger and Janan Cain

Skill taught: Behavior Management

Grades: Preschool through Fifth Grade

Summary: An accompaniment to The Way I Feel, this book explains and details character traits such as compassion, curiosity, capability and bravery. The story uses beautiful illustrations and verse to describe behavior in different contexts and how different types of children act differently. Furthermore, the text defines new vocabulary describing behavior in a judgment-free way, and gives students a new wealth of language to describe their own actions. 

 
My Mouth is a Volcano by Julia Cook and Carrie Hartman
Skill taught: Managing thoughts and words without interrupting

Grades: Preschool and up

Summary: An award winning book created to teach children about controlling their thoughts and expressing their ideas at an appropriate time. The book is written in friendly, witty verse that is accompanied by beautifully illustrated imagery. The story provides teachers, parents and interventionists a fun way to teach students to listen to others and wait their turn to speak. 

Decibella and her 6-inch Voice by Julia Cook and Anita De Falla

Skill taught: Listening and Communication

Grades: Kindergarten through third grade

Summary: A colorfully illustrated and thoughtfully written story about a girl who learns to use and her adjust her voice to communicate with confidence. This story teacher students about the five voice volumes, and how one must adjust their levels for different settings. The story uses humor to teach students effective communication techniques, and also provides a section of tips for parents and teachers. 

Personal Space Camp by Julia Cook and Carrie Hartman

Skill taught: Respecting personal Space

Grades: Preschool and up

Summary: An exceptional book that uses humor to teach children about respecting and maintaining personal space in a way that is witty and engaging.

Team Work Isn’t My Thing, and I Don’t Like to Share by Julia Cook
Skill taught: Sharing and Teamwork

Grades: Kindergarten and up

Summary: A great team building book that uses humor to teach students the value of working together and sharing their resources. This book is part of Ms. Cook’s Best Me I Can Be! collection, which includes many other titles that are also worth exploring. The additional titles cover topics such as peer pressure, making friends, asking for help and receiving feedback.

Social-Emotional Education

While academic skills are an important part of what schools need to impart to their students, there are a number of competencies that are as important -- and sometimes more so -- in helping children become happy, successful adults. These competencies are generally referred to as "social-emotional learning" and have been the subject of much attention from schools, researchers, and organizations in all areas of education. Here at The Yellin Center, we look at social and emotional issues as potential areas of strength or challenge for all of the students we see, and have long noted the importance of what we call social cognition as a part of success in school and life.

CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, is an organization whose mission is "to help make social and emotional learning an integral part of education from preschool through high school."

CASEL has described five areas of social-emotional competence:

"Self-awareness: The ability to accurately recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior. This includes accurately assessing one’s strengths and limitations and possessing a well-grounded sense of confidence and optimism.

Self-management: The ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations. This includes managing stress, controlling impulses, motivating oneself, and setting and working toward achieving personal and academic goals.

Social awareness: The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others from diverse backgrounds and cultures, to understand social and ethical norms for behavior, and to recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.

Relationship skills: The ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups. This includes communicating clearly, listening actively, cooperating, resisting inappropriate social pressure, negotiating conflict constructively, and seeking and offering help when needed.

Responsible decision making: The ability to make constructive and respectful choices about personal behavior and social interactions based on consideration of ethical standards, safety concerns, social norms, the realistic evaluation of consequences of various actions, and the well-being of self and others."

CASEL works with schools, districts, and policy makers at state, federal and local levels to advance legislation and programs that promote social-emotional education in schools. Their work is highlighted in the first of a series of reports entitled From Practice to Policy, from the National Association of State Boards of Education.

No discussion, however brief, of social-emotional competence can be complete without mention of Daniel Goleman, a co-founder of CASEL and generally credited with popularizing the term "emotional intelligence" or "EQ" (as opposed to "IQ) in his best-selling 1995 book of the same name. By bringing the concept of emotional intelligence into popular culture, he helped to lay the groundwork for applying its tenets to education and business, and facilitating research into the connections between social-emotional competence and brain development. And, in his new book, Focus, Goleman discusses how the pathways that regulate social cognition and attention are interrelated. Dr. Yellin has read it and strongly recommends it.