Discuss the significance of the unconscious and/or emotions and/or intuition in learning.

This essay will discuss the significance of the unconscious in learning and how experience can be gained without awareness. It will also examine the extent to which educational establishments pay attention to emotional intelligence and how emotions and feelings can block the learning process, and finally it will mention how intuition and insight prove to be relevant when learning new skills.

To start, I would like to define emotions as being ‘a feeling and its distinctive thoughts, psychological and biological states, and range of propensities’ (Goleman : 1996 : 289). Goleman is the person most commonly associated with the term Emotional Intelligence. In his readings, he came upon the work of Mayer and Salovey. In 1995 his book ‘Emotional Intelligence; was published. In this book, he had collected a lot of interesting information on the brain, emotions and behaviour promoting possibly his misleading version of Emotional Intelligence. Mayer and Salovey however seemed to be more interested in scientific truth explaining that Emotional Intelligence consists of four branches of mental ability -: emotional identification, perception and expression – emotional facilitation of thought – emotional understanding and emotional management, responsibility for one’s own emotions and knowing how to separate healthy from unhealthy feelings and turning the negative into positive. Emotional State depends very much on outside events. There are several primary emotions – anger, sadness, fear and enjoyment and these all affect our learning in different ways. Emotions and feelings can block the learning process. They ways in which a teacher teaches and treats pupils (encouragement or humiliation)

Emotional intelligence expands ones abilities into 5 areas – knowing ones emotions (self-awareness), managing and containing them, motivating oneself (emotional self-control), being aware and recognising emotions in others and effectively handling relationships (managing emotions in others, empathy and sensitivity).

Emotional intelligence is a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s emotions, to discriminate among them and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions) Mayer & Salovey, 1993 : 433)

Humanism recognises that the learner is a creative and active agent and that the recognition of emotions must be considered to make a whole person. Maslow demonstrates this with his hierarchy of needs. Satisfying the Physiological, safety, love and self-esteem needs moving on to self-actualisation. Thomas Gordon also says that self-esteem cannot be achieved until we have a satisfactory self-concept and an ideal self. We must have self-acceptance and be completely aware of our feelings.

To acquire a concept requires not only language activity but also strenuous mental activity. Vygotsky suggests that a relationship between ideas becomes fixed ...

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To acquire a concept requires not only language activity but also strenuous mental activity. Vygotsky suggests that a relationship between ideas becomes fixed only if the learner develops an attitude or an emotional relationship towards it (188) Our processes of thought, our ideas, emanate from us and we often get excited by ideas. It is not possible to weigh an idea and come to a decision, without some emotional commitment. Pupil’s feelings of alienation show the role of emotion in education. One look can be worth a thousand descriptions. (Rubenstein, D. Education & Equality Middlesex : Penguin 1979)

‘In studies of home life and the formation of relationships within the family, issues about emotion and effect come into prominence’ (Wood, D. How Children think and learn 2nd ed. Oxford : Blackwell 2001)

Cognitive therapy basically promotes taking control of our feeling by our thoughts. Event – Thought – Emotion. This is often referred to as ‘constructive thinking’ and is similar to the principles of cognitive therapy and positive thinking in general. Whatever we decide to call it, the way we think definitely has an impact on our feelings and lives. Shakespeare said ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. Abraham Lincoln said ‘Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be’.

Emotions have the ability to distort our vision of reality since our thoughts are being clouded by our feelings.

Our thoughts and our interpretations of events do affect our feelings and that changing the way we think can change not only our feeling but also our lives.

Learning is the process by which skills; attitudes, knowledge and concepts are acquired, understood, applied and extended. (Children) also learn about their feelings towards themselves, towards each other and towards learning itself. Learning is therefore partly a cognitive process and partly social and affective. Successful learning may result in confidence, pleasure and a sense of achievement. However, failure may result in low self-esteem, apathy, avoidance and aggression. (Pollard: 1997)

Intuition forms a different way of knowing. It can be explained as a creative leap, a sudden insight, a feeling of premonition or a ‘gut’ feeling. It is about seeing the whole picture and reframing or reconceptualising it. Intuitive people seek out patterns and relationships among the facts they have gathered. They trust hunches and their intuition and look for the ‘big picture’

Dreams, Mediation, prayer, creative acts, premonition. Insight through non-linear or rational means

Emotion & The Unconscious – The Psychodynamic Perspective

‘Psychoanalysis is interested in delving beyond the conscious level of meaning. It offers some valuable insights for understanding the unconscious dimensions of the emotional self’ (Lupton, D. The Emotional Self London : Sage Publications, 1998 ; pp27-28)

Emotions are often felt or experienced at the unconscious level of experience. Emotions may be expressed in dreams or fantasies. The unconscious is formed through social experience and in turn shapes human action.

It was Freud who first began the project of psychoanalysis and developed the notion of the unconscious. Freud’s theory has made a monumental contribution to our understanding of the human personality. The human personality contains and is greatly influence by an unconscious mind harbouring repressed and forgotten memories, which in turn determine conscious thoughts and behaviour.

Experiences gained in early childhood have a crucially important influence on emotional and personality development. Development of the personality according to

Freud is seen as proceeding through a number of psychosexual stages. During each stage, satisfaction is gained as the libido is directed towards a difference part of the body. Failure to negotiate satisfactorily a particular stage results in a halting of development at that stage. Fixation causes the individual to retain some of the characteristics of that stage in later life and in several cases, may result in neuroses in later life.

Freud based his ideas on Psychic determination where all behaviour has a cause and is determined. The cause to be found in the mind. He discussed unconscious behaviour stating that processes that lie outside the individual’s awareness govern us all. Ideas, feeling and experiences which are blocked from conscious awareness by the power of repression.

He also analysed dreams and concluded that they operate on two levels, the symbolic content which the conscious mind aware of and the latent content, being the true meaning.

The conscious and unconscious are keys to understanding behaviour and the problems of personality.

More recent theory recognises the relationship between emotion, individual experience and the unconscious. As such, it may be considered as a social constructionist approach. For psychoanalytic theorists, emotional investments are paramount to understanding motivation and action. It is argued that the unconscious is a powerful source of emotional response, particularly for those emotions that we may find illogical or difficult to find a reasonable explanation for.

A major feature of psychoanalytic theory is the inevitability of the repetition of features of early relationships. Most unconscious feelings, fantasies and neuroses according to Freud, originate when a young child goes through individuation from the mother. This point of development is crucial to the state of people’s future emotional well being and their adult relationships with others.

At the heart of human behaviour are the concepts of unconscious mechanisms by which people deal with feelings that are potentially destructive to the self, such as anxiety, fear, envy, hate and emptiness. By these unconscious defence mechanisms, unacceptable or painful emotions are removed from the self and transferred to other people or things.

Most of us have experienced novelty without awareness when we learn a new skill. We may find ourselves humming anew tune that we may have heard, but haven’t made a conscious effort to remember. In certain instance, we may not even be aware of the extent of our new knowledge and we certainly aren’t aware of the learning process. Two areas of the brain are at work in this process (Dr’s Berns & Cohen). The right pre frontal cortex controls learning consistencies and storing expectations and deep in the centre of the brain, the striatum seems to weigh up what the cortex knows from experience against what is currently happening. If the environment alters, this system notices it and unconsciously alters behaviour accordingly. ‘This study shows that the human brain is quite adept at learning subtleties, creating expectations and altering behaviour without even knowing we’re doing it’ (Gregory S Berns, M.D., Ph,D., resident in psychiatry at the WPMC’s Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic)

It is striking how much or our learning happens unconsciously.

Several difference casual strands relate emotion and memory. Emotions are known to arise from many causes.

A first major influence of emotion on learning is mediated through its influence on attention. Attention in turn enhances later memory. Attention is largely controlled by the ‘interestingness’ of the event and its affective significance, i.e. sex, violence (Ekman, P & Davidson, R.J. The Nature of Emotion New York : Oxford Uni. Press 1994 pp 303)

Emotions (p304) play separate roles in learning. They frequently accompany failed expectations or interruptions. They mobilise attention to those features of an external situation that learners judge to be significant or predictive of the cause of the failed expectations causing greater learning.

A central idea in learning theory is that learning is driven by expectation failures; when events don'’ happen as expected, we have to learn more, to adjust our expectations to a changed reality. Such expectation failures are also likely to be causes of emotional reactions.

The significance of the unconscious and/or emotions and/or intuition plays a significant role in learning. As I have discussed much of our learning happens unconsciously or intuitively and those conscious and unconscious thoughts are keys to understanding behaviour and personality problems. We can also learning intuitively through our dreams and premonition bring in non-rational means.