>>Richard: Thank you
all very, very much.
It really is just a delight
to be here and an honor
to be considered a part of
this amazing collaborative
which I have been a champion and
fan of from afar and it's just great
to be here and, in a very
short amount of time,
share with you what has been
some absolutely amazing work
that has been going on in
neuroscience and its relevance
to social and emotional education.
And if there's one take home message
that I'd like you to walk away
with from my presentation today it's
that social-emotional
learning changes the brain.
And the brain is really the organ
that is the target of
these interventions.
So this is a very ambitious
outline of what I hope to cover.
I'm going to tell you a
snippet about neuroplasticity,
the idea that the brain is the
organ that's built to change
in response to experience.
I'll then tell you a little bit
about what we know about one
of the key attributes which is shaped
by social and emotional learning
which is a child's capacity to
regular her or his emotions.
And finally, I'm going
to conclude by suggesting
that we can change the
brain by training the mind
through social and
emotional learning.
We know that environmental factors
influence and shape the brain.
We know that the emotional
environment in early life,
in particular, is absolutely central
in shaping the circuits of the brain
in ways that persist throughout an
organism's entire adult lifespan.
The brains of children are
constantly being shaped.
They're literally being molded
by experience, both of a negative
and positive sort, both
wittingly and unwittingly.
And I think our task
must be to take the reins
and to promote positive brain changes
and one of the central vehicles is
through social and
emotional learning.
One of the things I
tell my students is
that behavioral interventions
are biological.
That is, if you do something
to intervene in a way
that changes behavior
it's got to be the case
that you're changing the brain.
There is no other way that we
know for behavior to change other
than through it's change
in the brain.
And, in fact, there's
every reason to think
that behavioral interventions can
produce more specific brain changes
than any quote biological
intervention like a medication
because behavioral
interventions have the capacity
to affect very specific
brain circuits in ways
that modern medicine does not have.
So I'm going to invite you to
consider the idea that social
and emotional learning
can change brain function
and actually brain structure and
can produce adaptive emotional
and cognitive functioning
as a consequence.
So, for those of you who
are not used to looking
at brains all the time I want
to just show you a little bit
about where these things occur in
the brain, what these circuits are,
and time does not permit me
to spend a lot of time on this
but I'll just tell you
a little bit about this.
So, the upper left here is the
ventral surface of the brain,
the bottom side of the brain.
If you turn the brain upside-down
this is what you would see.
And the area that's shaded in
green here is very important
for making emotional
judgments about information,
deciding whether something
is good or bad,
and that's called the
orbitofrontal cortex.
Now, this diagram here,
the blue area,
is the dorsoateral prefrontal cortex.
This is the area of the brain that
historically has not been considered
to be important for emotion
but it's critical, we now know,
for certain aspects of emotion
particularly the capacity
to guide decision-making
through positive emotions.
So if a child has a goal to
achieve a certain positive outcome
and is directing her or his
behavior to the achievement
of that goal we know that the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
is critical.
These areas in this bottom
diagram here are areas
in lower brain regions,
subcortical regions,
that play a very important role in
emotion as well and the area shaded
in orange, I'll specifically
mention in a few minutes,
called the amygdala is a key site,
particularly for negative emotions,
for detecting threats and so forth.
And this is another important area
called the anterior cingulate that's
very important conflict resolution of
both a cognitive and emotional sort.
And, again, I'll say a little bit
more about these a little later
but right now I want to talk a little
bit about the prefrontal cortex,
this area that Dan mentioned,
which up until quite recently
was regarded much more in terms
of its role in thought
than in emotion.
Now this is a very
interesting study and I want you
to mostly pay attention
to these pie charts here
and I'll give you a
definition of what these mean.
This is a study that's done
with kids, with adolescents
and with adults all of whom
were performing the same kind
of working memory task.
This is a task where if, for example,
I give you a telephone number
and I ask you to remember
the telephone number.
I'm going to ask you what that number
is in just a couple of minutes.
This is what working memory is.
It's maintaining information
in a conscious buffer.
And it turns out that the prefrontal
cortex is very important for that.
And if you look at the area that's
shaded in blue in these pie charts,
it indicates the amount of the
prefrontal cortex that's activated
as a child, as an adolescent, and
as an adult does at this task.
And you can see in the kids, the
area in blue is really a thin slice
but then the adolescent is
using a much larger expanse
of prefrontal cortex,
much more of the brain
that is activated is
the prefrontal cortex,
and in adults you see the
most extreme form of this.
And so there's a huge
developmental change between children
and adolescents and, in
fact, adolescents is a period
when the prefrontal cortex is really
coming online in very important ways
and plays a critical role in the
integration of thought and emotion
and particularly in the
regulation of emotion.
Now, this is a diagram that's meant
to illustrate one very important
aspect of the regulation of emotion
and it illustrates two hypothetical
kids, Person A and Person B,
and imagine that something
bad happens at this point.
There is an episode of
bullying or some other--
someone says something
nasty to a child
and on various physiological
parameters we can measure the time
course of a child's response.
And Person B is shown to recover
much more quickly compared
to Person A. Person A shows a much
more long-lasting, a perseverative,
response to this negative event.
And we've been learning about
what are the brain systems
that may be involved in these
differences among kids and,
of course, our goal in social
and emotional learning is
to foster this kind of pattern,
a more adaptive pattern,
where following a negative
event a child is able to better
and more effectively regulate his or
her emotions so that they can calm
down more quickly permitting
a more effective kind
of thinking in that situation.
Now, this is the kind of experimental
stimulus we might use in a study
which depicts, in this case, a child
with a tumor growing out of its eye
to provoke some negative emotion
and there are dramatic differences
that occur in the amygdala,
which is this part
of the brain I mentioned earlier,
very important for negative emotion
if an individual learns to actively
reappraise that negative stimulus
in a way that facilitates a more
positive and adaptive response.
And so, the bar graphs
here indicate--
in the yellow, when an individual is
actively reappraising this stimulus
in a healthy way, we see that
there is a decreased response
in the amygdala.
And so what this simply shows is that
using skills that are very similar
to those taught in social
and emotional learning,
and in this case the
training was only one hour,
these were older adolescents who
were being studied in this case,
what we see is that they can
actually change their brain.
The brain changes in
a very systematic way.
Now, it turns out that people
who are the most effective
in down regulating their amygala
show activation in this part
of the prefrontal cortex, which is
the ventromedial prefrontal cortex,
and there is a tight reciprocal
relation between this part
of the prefrontal cortex
and the amygdala.
So this is a part of the prefrontal
cortex that modulates activity
in the amygdala and this
shows that relation.
And I won't bore you with
the technical details
but what this means
is that people who--
these dots represent individual
participants, and that people who are
up in this corner of the
diagram, those are individuals
who show very strong activation
of the prefrontal cortex
and they show much diminished
activation in the amygdala,
which is plotted here, indicating
that these are very
effective emotion regulators.
Now one question that we've
asked is whether this matters
in terms of people's health.
And one of the ways we
assess this is by looking
at a hormone that's very important
in stress called cortisol.
And we asked the question
whether people
who are good emotion
regulators, defined on the basis
of their brain pattern, actually show
a more adaptive profile of cortisol
where they show lower levels of
cortisol particularly in the evening.
And it turns out that not
only are these strategies
of the emotion regulation
good for your brain
but they're good for your body!
They actually lower the level of
the stress hormone cortisol which,
it turns out, if it's present in high
levels is actually very deleterious
to the brain and interferes
with both your emotions as well
as with learning and memory.
Now, I want to just show you--
this is from a very new study
that we've done in adolescents.
This is from a group of
about seventy adolescents,
average age about fourteen, and what
we did is we showed the very same
thing in these kids.
That is, those kids who are showing
strong activation in this area
of the prefrontal cortex when they
are regulating their emotions have
lower levels of cortisol
in the evening.
And what this means is that,
particularly when it persists
over time, good emotion regulation
skills is good for your brain
and good for your body and lowers
your levels of this stress hormone.
When this stress hormone is
present in high levels cumulatively
over time it actually interferes
with circuits in the brain,
specifically the amygdala
and the hippocampus both
of which are very important
for learning and memory.
Now this is other work
where we have shown
that if you make a individual
anxious, this is done in adolescents,
you actually interfere with your
ability to perform certain kinds
of working memory tasks, the sort
of tasks that I described earlier.
And this is a study
that involved very,
very careful experimental controls.
We were able to show that
it's specifically the anxiety
that is interfering with this
particular kind of working memory
and the more anxious a person
is the worse their working
memory performance.
We've replicated it in another
study here and we've shown
that it's specifically through
changes in the prefrontal cortex
that the interference
in memory occurs.
And so, the implication here is
that if you can lower your anxiety,
if you are learning skills to calm
you, you will improve the function
of the prefrontal cortex.
It will be less jangled by threats
that occur in your environment
and you'll actually not
only show improved emotion
but you will also show improved
cognition, you will do better
on tests like this of working memory
which other research
indicates underlies a lot
of academic performance.
Now, I want to just
show you, before I end,
that there are new imaging techniques
that we can now use non-invasively
and this is the just really, really
cool stuff that we're doing now.
This actually shows the
individual connections
between the prefrontal cortex
and the amygdala anatomically!
We can now visualize this and
quantitate it in individual kids,
which we are now doing, to
determine the impact of interventions
like social and emotional learning
not just on the functioning
of the brain but literally on the
connections between these regions
that are absolutely essential
to effective emotion regulation.
So let me summarize and conclude.
I've tried to show you
that the brain is plastic.
It's built to change in
response to experience.
The prefrontal cortex
is absolutely key.
We call it a convergence
zone for affect
and cognition or thought and feeling.
And we also know that negative
emotions will interfere
with cognitive prefrontal function
that is with cognitive operations
that are occurring in
the prefrontal cortex.
Social-emotional learning is an
empirically verified strategy
to improve skills of emotion
regulation and social adaptation and,
as such, social-emotional learning
likely produces beneficial changes
in the brain.
Education that shapes the child's
brain and likely produces these kinds
of alterations lay the
foundation for all future learning
for emotion regulation and
for social functioning.
Qualities such as patience,
calmness, cooperation
and kindness should
really now best be regarded
as skills that can be trained.
They are not traits that
we are irrevocably given
by our early environment or by our
genetics but everything we now know
about the brain, including down
to the level of gene expression,
indicates that training like social
and emotional learning
can shape the brain
and literally change gene
expression in the brain.
And research is critically
needed now to document the impact
of social-emotional learning.
>>Question: Is there any age at
which point it may not change?
>>Question: How old is the child?
>>Richard: Here's the good news.
Definitively no.
No age. It occurs through--
plasticity occurs throughout life
and we know-- there's
hard data to show this.
So we know that, for
example, neurogenesis,
which is the actual growth of
new neurons which, by the way,
is an idea that when I was a graduate
student was regarded as fiction.
We thought that the brain was
different from other organs
in not regenerating cells.
We now know that that's
just definitively not true.
Neurogenesis occurs throughout life.
It is the case, though, that there
are sensitive periods of plasticity.
We don't exactly know what
those sensitive periods are
for social and emotional learning.
They are probably not the same
kind of steep curves that you see
for something like learning a
second language where we know
that the period of plasticity
it dramatically drops off
after you pass early adolescence.
So there are likely to be sensitive
periods but I would say that,
based on what we now know, I
don't think there's any period
after which we need to say that the
door is closed although it may take
more intensive intervention
after a certain age.
>>Question: Larry Aber from NYU.
The affective chronometry, comment
about how everybody's aroused
when the tiger's about to eat us
and then there's patterns
of change after that.
I think it's pretty important
to help non-scientists think
about context dependence.
We don't want to not flee from the
tiger, so any thoughts about that?
>>Richard: Yeah, that's
a very helpful point
and I appreciate you making
it and I actually tried to--
[inaudible] I tried to
illustrate the graphs in such a way
that they both reached the
same amplitude of responding
yet they differed in the
rapidity with which they recovered
but you're absolutely right.
When certain kinds of stress occurs,
when something dangerous occurs,
it's adaptive for certain
physiological systems to kick in.
What's not adaptive is for
those systems to persist.
It's also the case that in our
modern culture the honest truth is
that we are rarely confronted
with the evolutionary dangers
that have been part of our
philo-genetic past.
And yet these same
systems are recruited
when our self-esteem
may be questioned
or when a child is being bullied.
They are not physical
threats to our survival
but they hijack the same
biological machinery.
And that is, I think,
where the importance
of social-emotional learning is in
helping to modulate those circuits
and I think those are things
that we can see in the brain
and in the body using the
right kinds of methods.
>>Narrator: For more
information on What Works
in Public Education
go to edutopia.org.
