There have been varying schools of thought on the part emotions play in student learning.

While no one would suggest that a depressed or angry student is the best kind of learner, few absolutes extended beyond that. For example, a few years ago I interviewed someone from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, a non-profit research center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

From that conversation, I gathered it was just as important, at least in the opinion of the center researchers, to spend as much time and attention cultivating children’s social skills and building a supportive learning environment than it was to build knowledge in academic areas.

Yet I remember talking to another professor months later, who criticized the craze on boosting students’ self-esteem, saying all that praise and adulation sometimes backfired, confusing students (and parents) on the real purpose of learning and completing tasks: to acquire knowledge, not bumper stickers.

Now comes a new finding from the academicians: Students in a neutral and even sad mood actually perform better academically than happy students. University of Virginia psychology professor Vikram Jaswal along with colleagues from the University of Plymouth in England tested 6- and 7-year-olds’ and 10- and 11-year-olds’ ability to perform detail-oriented tasks when induced into emotion states through music and films.

The researchers found that students who were “induced” into a happy state had a harder time finding shapes hidden within a larger object than the children who were feeling neither really good nor really bad, or those who were a bit down in the dumps.

“What our study shows is that artificially inflating a child’s mood may make it harder for them to pay attention to details, which could be important in school contexts,” Jaswal told the Charlotte News.

What do you think? Let us know by posting a comment.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor