Affective Neuroscience - Affective Neuroscience and Learning

Affective Neuroscience and Learning

There are many ways affect plays a role during learning. Recently, affective neuroscience has done much to discover this role. Deep, emotional attachment to a subject area allows a deeper understanding of the material and therefore, learning occurs and lasts. When reading, the emotions one is feeling in comparison to the emotions being portrayed in the content affects ones comprehension. Someone who is feeling sad will understand a sad passage better than someone feeling happy. Therefore, a student’s emotion plays a big role during the learning process.

Emotion can also be embodied or perceived from words read on a page or a person’s facial expression. Neuroimaging studies using fMRI have demonstrated that the same area of the brain being activated when one is feeling disgust is also activated when one observes another person feeling disgust. In a traditional learning environment, the teacher's facial expression can play a critical role in students' language acquisition. Showing a fearful facial expression when reading passages that contain fearful tones facilitates students learning of the meaning of certain vocabulary words and comprehension of the passage.