Affective Networks

Learning requires interaction with the external world-with varied materials, tools, people, and contexts. But different students experience the same situations in very different ways. A well-known poem by e. e. cummings illustrates this idea:

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.*

**"maggie and molly and milly and may." Copyright 1956, 1984, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. From SELECTED POEMS by E. E. Cummings, Introduction & Commentary Richard S. Kennedy. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

With the closing line "it's always ourselves we find in the sea," cummings summarizes a principle long known to poets and now confirmed by neuroscientists: What individuals "see" is determined partly by their own internal state-a melting pot of emotions, needs, and memories. Each girl in the poem experiences the beach in her own distinctive manner.

To illustrate this further, let's return to "The Unexpected Visitor" (see Figure 2.9). Look at the picture again and note what grabs your attention. A variety of factors determines what attracts your eye and how long you inspect the image. There's your emotional state, your familiarity with the picture, your interest (or lack of interest) in the content or form, and your state of energy or fatigue, to name just a few. More generally, we can say that your memory, personality, motivation, mood, interest, and biological state all influence how you interact with the picture.

d - Figure 2.9 - The "Unexpected Visitor" Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Eye Movements and Vision by Alfred L. Yarbus © 1967 by Plentum Publishers, Inc.

Of course, these kinds of characteristics and states vary tremendously across viewers. A psychologist might attend to the expressions on the people's faces, while an interior designer might take note of the room's dÈcor. The mother of a toddler might be drawn to the child seated at the table, whereas a musician might first notice the piano. If asked to comment on the state of mind of those in the picture, each viewer would offer a unique perspective.

The power of affective variables to influence what we see and how we interpret the environment is exploited in the Rorschach, a projective test used by psychologists. The inkblot in Figure 2.10 is not from the Rorschach itself, but it presents a similarly ambiguous image.

d - Figure 2.10 - Inkblot Image courtest of Helge Malmegrem, Department of Philosophy, Göteborg University, Sweden. Reprinted with permission from the HTML version of Moving Toward the Other, a poster presented at the "Tuscon III" conference, April 27-May 3, 1998.

Clearly, inkblots are not representational images. Still, most people, when asked to describe what they see in an inkblot, find figures, animals, or objects. By collecting many responses, researchers develop norms based on what people without emotional disturbances are likely to find in these patterns. (Because the strong emotions experienced by people with affective disorders tend to significantly influence what they see in the outside world, they tend to register unusual responses on tests like the Rorschach.) By examining a patient's responses across many different stimuli and looking for commonalities and patterns, psychologists can deduce a patient's fears, preoccupations, and desires.

To some extent, the entire world is a Rorschach. At any instant, multiple facets of the environment compete for our attention. These demands require not only that we recognize objects and formulate strategies, but also that we evaluate their significance and importance to ourselves. How we do so largely reflects our own emotions and motivations.

Emotion, like recognition and strategy, belongs to circumscribed networks within the brain. Recognition networks help us to identify objects, such as coffeepots and cars, and strategic networks enable us to act on these objects-reaching to pour, turning to steer. Affective networks attach emotional significance to these objects and actions, influencing in a third way what we see and do.

Background Knowledge: The connections between thinking and feeling is the subject of this text interview with nearoscientist Joseph Ledoux.

Like recognition and strategic networks, affective networks are extremely efficient. Murphy and Zajonc (1993) have demonstrated that our brains can evaluate the importance of an object within just a quarter of a second! In spite of their complexity, affective evaluations are performed rapidly and effectively. How is this so?

Affective Processes are Distributed

Intuitively, emotion seems to be a more complex and elusive phenomenon than recognition or strategy. However, the neural processing of emotion occurs in a very similar way. Affective networks are made up of many specialized modules, located predominantly at the core of the brain and associated with the limbic system (Damasio, 1994). Some of these modules are visible in Figure 2.11. Because affective networks are distributed across many modules, learners exhibit many differences along many continua that influence their motivation to learn and their subsequent and ongoing engagement with learning tasks.

d - Figure 2.11 - Affective Networks This medial view of the brain shows the limbic lobe, site of the affective networks. The limbic lobe includes primitve cortical tissue (stippled area), the fontal lobes, and underlying cortical structures (hippocampus and dentate gyrus, not shown).

Evidence of the distributed nature of affective networks comes from the selective deficits that result from disease or damage in specific locations within the brain. Some patients can express emotion but cannot recognize emotion in other people's faces or voices. Others show the reverse deficit: They can read emotional responses of others but they cannot express emotion themselves. These two types of deficits are linked to brain damage in different, specific locations (DeKosky, Heilman, Bowers, & Valenstein, 1980; Heilman, Scholes, & Watson, 1975). What this research tells us is that we use different parts of our affective networks to recognize emotion and to express emotion. Further, the subprocesses involved in recognizing emotion, like being able to interpret facial expressions and speech for emotional content, are each handled by different areas.

It should come as no surprise that affective networks operate in parallel. They process different kinds of emotional information simultaneously and communicate closely though myriad interconnections to create a whole affective impression. When students watch a teacher during a lecture, they process the expression on her face and the emotion in her voice at the same time. Further, because the brain modules are interconnected, the teacher's facial expressions influence how the students interpret her voice (de Gelder, Bocker, Tuomainen, Hensen, & Vroomen,1999).

Affect Involves Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing

As with the other two networks, the modules that make up affective networks are hierarchically organized, and the information travels in both bottom-up and top-down directions. Bottom-up connections in affective networks ensure that we are emotionally responsive to the outside world. Information travels from the sensory organs (such as the eyes and ears) up the hierarchical continuum. When it reaches the apex of the pathway-the limbic cortex-we "feel" emotional reactions.

We respond to emotionally reactive stimuli, such as scary faces, even when we are not consciously aware of them (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993). Before we even identify a sound or shape, our nervous system may initiate physiological responses such as an adrenaline rush, muscular contractions, and increased blood pressure-our bodies' physical manifestations of fear. This purely unconscious emotion reflects a second type of bottom-up processing, in which information travels only partway up the hierarchy, stopping short of the cortex (LeDoux, 1998). This type of processing gives rise to a cruder emotional response, one that may or may not be appropriate to the given situation.

Here's an everyday example that illustrates bottom-up affective processing. Suppose you are walking in unfamiliar woods and detect a sudden movement in your peripheral vision. Almost before you become aware of the disturbance, your eyes leap to focus on the source, and your body prepares for fight or flight. Seconds later, you identify the source of the sound: a harmless robin. Your initial responses to the noise-the physiological changes, the protective hunching of your body, and covering your head with your arms-are part of a crude defensive instinct mediated by rapid bottom-up processing. A full second may pass before your conscious awareness of fear coincides with a more analytical look at the source of the noise, so that you can decide what to do. In this case, you probably chuckle over your reaction and walk on..

Of course, instinctual emotional responses can be counterproductive. Extreme nervousness before a presentation, a recital, or an athletic competition can overwhelm and distract us, diminishing the effectiveness of our performance. Affective top-down processing helps us consciously calm ourselves through a variety of techniques such as breathing, refocusing attention, and visualizing success. Without top-down emotional processing, we would be vulnerable to intense, overblown emotions of all kinds and unable to practice the self-restraint needed to keep ourselves on task. Teachers can take advantage of top-down processing to help alleviate the negative emotion students may have learned to associate with schoolwork.

Individual Differences in Affective Networks

Because affective networks work in roughly similar ways across many individuals, we can make some fairly solid generalizations about how people respond to particular situations. Upon the death of a loved one we become sad; startled by a sudden loud noise or dangerous animal we become surprised and scared. However, human beings are not emotional clones. When confronted with the same life event, different people exhibit different kinds and intensities of emotion. In study after study, scientists have shown that people can be sorted into "high" and "low" emotional responders based on their patterns of self-reported emotion, changes in facial expression, or autonomic reflexes (Asendorpf, 1987; Carels et al., 1999; Cole, 1996; Dimberg, 1990; Larsen, 1987). Even animals display this variability (Adamec, 1991; Kalin, 1999; Kalin, Shelton, & Davidson, 2000).

It is easy to spot the outcomes of affective variability. The next time you find yourself in a doctor's office waiting room, take note of the other patients. Some will start to show signs of agitation the minute their appointment time has come and gone. Others will simply sit back and sigh; they might become upset only if the wait continues for an extended period. Still others will appear to simply accept the situation; they will remain relaxed and calm no matter how long the delay persists.

We might like to think that our emotional tendencies are acquired traits and therefore entirely controllable. However, brain research has revealed that some affective characteristics are strongly associated with measurable neurological differences. For example, functional brain imaging techniques have revealed that people suffering from clinical depression exhibit a characteristic asymmetry in the brain (Bruder et al., 1997; Tomarken, Davidson, Wheeler, & Doss, 1992). Depressives tend to have abnormally high resting brain activity in right-hemisphere affective networks. People suffering from panic disorder also show increased resting activity on the right side of the brain, but in different affective modules from those who are depressed (Reiman, et al., 1984).

Affective differences exert powerful influences on learners' ability to engage with learning and to progress. In studies of highly successful adult dyslexics, Rosalie Fink (1995, 1998) conclusively demonstrated the very significant positive impact affect can have on learning. The individuals in her study overcame severe deficits in recognition and strategic skills by virtue of their deep engagement with and interest in particular subject matter. Strong positive affect made the critical difference in their learning outcomes.

Conversely, and as more commonly noted, affective problems also interfere with learning in various ways. One of the reasons students with severe affective disorders related to childhood depression or abuse are often vulnerable to reading failure is because strong affective influences can derail the work of recognition and strategic networks (see Gentile, Lamb, & Rivers, 1985; Kinard, 2001). Students preoccupied with emotional concerns may have little attention left over for schoolwork. In addition, students with a history of learning problems often become discouraged about their own abilities and withdraw effort from learning tasks. Still others may learn to associate negative feelings with certain subjects or media.

Understanding affective issues can help teachers support all learners more appropriately. Of the three learning networks, affective networks are perhaps intuitively the most essential for learning, yet they are given the least formal emphasis in the curriculum. All teachers know how important it is to engage students in the learning process, to help them to love learning, to enjoy challenges, to connect with subject matter, and to persist when things get tough. When students withdraw their effort and engagement, it is tempting to consider this a problem outside the core enterprise of teaching. We believe this is a mistake. Attending to affective issues when considering students' needs is an integral component of instruction, and it can increase teaching effectiveness significantly.

Consider these differences: Some students prefer to read in a quiet environment; others are comfortable reading in the middle of noisy activity. Some like the predictability of reading familiar stories multiple times, whereas others find rereading boring. Some students like the structure of being told what books to read and when to read them; others thrive on choice and independence. In addition, of course, there is huge variation in the type of content that interests different learners. All these preferences factor in to why students whose skills and achievement levels appear very similar on a test may react-and perform-very differently to particular assignments.