This monthly article will feature a different learning skill each month and instead of talking theory will ONLY give ideas for targeting/strengthening that learning skill for ages 2 to 102! Remember that you can find ALL the learning skills in a free interactive tool.

Perceiving emotions: recognizing and identifying your own affective responses

In practical terms, helping children recognize and identify their emotions means carefully and calmly talking about your own emotional reactions and responses when discussing situations and feelings with a small child. Remember that children tend to learn how they should feel by how the adults around them react — think about the child who gets a small injury but checks the reaction of the nearest adult to see whether they should cry or not. A simplified Feelings Board that gives the names and facial examples of feelings can be extremely helpful in helping children recognize and identify their feelings. As children get older, gradually add more feelings to the board as a way to increase their emotional vocabulary. Remember, if you add a feeling, you have to be willing to confront and talk about it. Tom Drummond, a lifelong educator of young children who now works with schools, suggests not defaulting to the simplest emotions, even for the youngest children. We tend to connect “anger” to lashing out. “Happy” to laughing. “Fear” to hiding. The feeling-to-reaction for these emotions is generally too short and simple. Tom suggests asking a child if they are feeling frustrated or resentful instead of “angry”, as that challenges the child to pause and explore their feelings more reflectively and more thoughtfully consider any response. If you take this advice, be prepared to describe your own reactions as feeling indignant and dismayed rather than “angry”.

This can be so much fun in a variety of classes! As with children, we need a shared language of emotions/feelings before we can do much. Share a complex list with your students (such as available here) and USE IT. Emotions don’t need to be the main topic to be included; in any course that includes art, capitalize on the idea that one of the purposes of art is to evoke our feelings. Whether it’s poetry, a symphony, a novel, or a painting (or something else), students conducting a quick emotional check and hearing other students do the same can increase student engagement with topics that might initially seem distant in place and time. We can connect with our own emotions by identifying the feelings and words used for feelings by others. And visa-versa: When we identify our own emotions, it allows us to connect with others. This is the basis of effective rhetoric. Any historical speech, from Thucydides’ Funeral Oration of Pericles to Lincoln’s Gettysburg address to the latest State of the Union speech uses language specifically crafted to affect an audience emotionally. The same goes for every TV commercial and magazine ad! Helping students understand how language evokes emotions and how people, both good and bad, try to motivate audiences through their emotions is a critical part of modern education, particularly given the current array of mass media.

While it’s a stereotype that STEM folks are unwilling to talk about emotions or feelings, especially in the classroom, there IS generally a strong preference for greater focus on the cognitive aspects of learning than the social or affective. But where there are human beings, there are emotions and ignoring them doesn’t ultimately help learners. As with Liberal Arts classes, giving students recourse to a large list of emotions/feelings can be extremely helpful. In many STEM courses, it might be easiest to tackle perceiving emotions in the context of group work and collaboration: How members feel and how they choose to deal with those feelings. Until the feelings are consciously noticed (instead of ignored), they can’t be dealt with in ways that benefit the team as much as the individual. Engagement in problem-solving is also a fruitful area for elevating the purely metacognitive to include the “meta-affective”, with all the frustration, struggle, competition, despair, and elation it can include! Finally, consider how scientists communicate with people, both effectively and not. The difference very often comes down to empathy: SHARED feelings. If, as a STEM person, you aren’t perceptive of emotions (your own as well as those of your audience or the public), you’ll struggle to communicate in a compelling way. Students can be tasked to not only solve a problem, but to identify the emotional aspects of the problem and its solution, then drafting and assessing potential communications to “the public”.

A feelings board can be a fun thing for a family to work with. Other enjoyable ways to explore “perceiving emotions” include:

• Feelings Bingo: Create multiple cards (5 x 5 works well), each with a different array of emotions and play as you all watch a film or series to see who gets an emotional BINGO first
• Daily Debrief: Each person chooses three or four feelings/emotions from the feelings board to use as the basis or theme for talking about different aspects of their day
• Emotions Charades: Take turns acting out an emotion and see if others can guess it
• Emotions Pictionary: Like charades, but draw the emotions (this one ISN’T so easy)
• Emotions Avatars: As a group, try to come up with avatars or individual examples of each emotion (rage could be “The Hulk”, for example)
• Feelings Recipes: How do you create a given feeling? Work in teams to come up with recipes for a list of emotions. Sharing and comparing recipes will be interesting for all, especially for older family members as they listen to the recipes younger ones have for creating feelings.