Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

George Lucas and Daniel Goleman discuss the many ways that social and emotional learning enhance the education process.  Read the interview at edutopia.org: http://www.edutopia.org/lucas-goleman-social-emotional-learning

The “marshmallow test” became one of the best-known of all the scientific studies I wrote about in Emotional Intelligence; it was featured on 20/20, Oprah, and the Lehrer Report, as well as Time magazine. In this experiment four-year-olds from the Stanford University pre-school were brought to a room and sat in a chair in front of a juicy marshmallow on a table. The experimenter then told them they could eat it now, or get two if they were willing to wait until the experimenter came back from running an errand.

Now we have a better idea of exactly what part of those four-year-old brains was at work in resisting temptation or giving in. An article published August 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience [Marcel Brass at al., vol 27: pp 9141-9145] has pinpointed the brain area responsible for such feats of self-control. Whenever we get an impulse to do something, but then don’t act on it, we can thank – the dorsal fronto-median cortex — an area just above and between the eyes.

When you were young, which of these did you feel more often:

• No matter what I do, my parents love me.
• I can’t seem to please my parents, no matter what I do.
• My parents don’t really notice me.

The answers to such questions reveal more than about our childhood: they also tend to predict how we act in our closest relationships as adults.

Our childhood shapes our brain in many ways – and so determines our most basic ways of reacting to others — for better and for worse. If we felt well-loved in childhood, we tend to be secure in our relationships – but if not, then we’re more prone to chronic problems. When it comes to the engrained self-defeating habits that we bring to our adult relationships from childhood, understanding why we have these habits in the first place is a first step toward becoming free of their grip.

When I was a youngster, I was the only kid I knew who had two parents who worked. It was the 50s, when the mode was for dads to work and moms to stay home. These days it’s hard to find families where both parents do not need to hold jobs.

As a result, couples with infants and toddlers face the tough task of finding quality day care. Some studies have shown that two ingredients of better day care are having workers who are well-trained, and a lower ratio of children to workers.

Now Sir Richard Bowlby, the son of the famous British child development theorist John Bowlby, adds a third ingredient: having someone at day care with whom your child can form a nurturing emotional bond.

Sir Richard emailed me after reading Social Intelligence to say, “Babies and toddlers in daycare avoid chronic separation anxiety if they can develop an emotional bond with one carer.”

Here he follows up on the work of his father which shows that especially during the first two-and-a-half years of life an empathic, responsive caretaker helps a child develop a basic sense of security in the world, one that becomes a basis of healthy relationships lifelong. I explored this idea – and updated it in terms of new neuroscience evidence – in Chapter Eleven of Social Intelligence.

Half a dozen mothers are watching videos of themselves caring for their toddlers, taped in their homes a week or two before. The videos present a montage of each of the mothers with their toddlers in warm moments. The soundtrack: the song “You Are so Beautiful.”

“That is the song,” the group leader tells them, “your children are singing to you.”

The point of the meetings is for each mother to become more aware of her strengths at mothering, and to try to get better at habits that need improvement. So over the ensuing weeks, they will see other videos that show their struggles at caregiving – being too intrusive, or tuned-out, or simply missing cues from their toddler about what’s needed.

The mothers study the videos of themselves and their toddlers, and get coached in how, for instance, to be more relaxed about letting their kids explore and play, or being more sensitive to when a two-year-old wants a hug of just the reassurance of sitting on her lap.

I’ve been hearing about schools that are beginning to offer teachers courses in social intelligence. This makes good sense. Social neuroscience makes clear that the emotional tone of a classroom can be set to a large extent by the teacher. This means that teachers are able to help students get and stay in better brain states for learning (see chapter 19 of Social Intelligence for details).

The neural wiring between our thinking and emotional centers, neuroscience tells us, means our feelings can either enhance or inhibit the brain’s ability to learn. And now the new field of social neuroscience has shown that while two people interact, their emotional centers impact each other, for better or for worse.

Taken together, these results have direct implications for creating educational approaches and social climates in schools that can boost students’ ability to learn. The best results come when students, teachers, and school leaders each take steps to become more emotionally self-aware and socially intelligent, as I argued in my article “The Socially Intelligent Leader,” in the September 2006, issue of Educational Leadership.

This could be best accomplished by creating training programs in social/emotional learning (or SEL) for teachers and school staff, like those now being offered for children (see CASEL.org for more info).