EMOTIONS AND LEARNING

• Jensen (1998) points out that emotions drive attention, meaning and memory and are critical to patterning in the brain.
• Stock (1996, p.6 ) notes that “…every sensory input we receive is processed through our emotional center first…before it is sent on and processed in our rational mind… .”
• Others describe the centrality of emotion as “…mak[ing] possible all creative thought (Greenspan, 1997), “…a sort of biological thermostat [which] activates attention…which then activates a rich set of problem-solving and response systems and …In fact, of driv[ing] everything (Brandt, 2000).
• Sylwester (1994) states that emotion “…drives attention, which in turn drives memory” and Vail (2002) terms emotions, the “On/Off Switch for Learning”.
• Positive affect enhances creative, breadth-first thinking whereas negative affect encourages depth-first processing and minimizes distractions.
• Norman observes that “…neurochemicals change the parameters of thought, adjusting such things as whether reason is primarily depth first (focused, not easily distracted) or breadth first (creative, out of the box thinking but easily distractible).”
• Negative affect such as anxiety, to a point, focuses the mind leading to better concentration. As Norman notes, “Anxiety and fear squirt neural transmitters into the brain that narrow the thought process. In general this is good to focus upon a specific threat or problem.” Positive affect broadens the thought process and leads to creative thinking with a side effect of easy distractibility. This can be a particular problem in e-learning where the Web presents such opportunities for exploration . Positive emotions can assist us in difficult tasks whereas negative emotions make it harder to do even simple tasks. Emotions then alter our performance on cognitive tasks.