The past decade has seen major advances in cognitive, affective and social neuroscience that have the potential to revolutionize educational theories about learning. The importance of emotion and social learning has long been recognized in education, but due to technological limitations in neuroscience research techniques, treatment of these topics in educational theory has largely not had the benefit of biological evidence to date. In this article, I lay out two general, complementary findings that have emerged from the past decade of (...) neuroscience research on emotion and social processing, with a view to beginning a dialogue about the meaning of these findings for educational theory. First, emotion and cognition are intertwined, and involve interplay between the body and mind. Second, social processing and learning happen by internalizing our subjective interpretations of other people's beliefs, goals, feelings and actions, and vicariously experiencing aspects of these as if they were our own. Together, these two results from neuroscience could have important implications for the design of learning environments; to discover these will require reconciling established educational learning theories with the current neurobiological evidence. (shrink)

Social emotions about others’ mind states, for example, compassion for psychological pain or admiration for virtue, are an important foundation for morality because they help us decide how to treat other people. Although these emotions are ostensibly concerned with the mental qualities and situations of others, they can precipitate intimately subjective reflections on the quality of one’s own social life and mind, and via these reflections incite a desire to engage in meaningful moral actions. Our interview and neural data suggest (...) that the shift from social emotion to introspection may be facilitated by conscious mental evaluation of emotion-related visceral sensations. (shrink)

Social emotions about others’ minds, for example, admiration for virtue and compassion for social pain, play a critical role in interpersonal relationships, motivation, and morality. However, historical biases toward studying emotions as automatic reactions generated within a solitary individual limit our ability to study emotions about others’ minds, which are inherently complex, social, and subjective. Here, I argue that a microdevelopmental approach, that is, considering these emotions as dynamic, context-dependent mental constructions actively organized from simpler cognitive and affective psychological components, (...) may help to overcome the difficulties of studying these emotions by providing new perspectives on: reliably inducing these emotions; parsing the ensuing experiences into component psychological processes organizing over time; and relating these component processes to patterns of brain activation. (shrink)

Presenting evidence from the social brain, we argue that neural reuse is a dynamic, socially organized process that is influenced ontogenetically and evolutionarily by the cultural transmission of mental techniques, values, and modes of thought. Anderson's theory should be broadened to accommodate cultural effects on the functioning of architecturally similar neural systems, and the implications of these differences for reuse.