ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that to understand the relation between emotion and learning we need to consider the body, embodied brain, social mind, cultural context, and their mutual interdependences. Educators, then, need to be sensitive not only to what emotions students have, which is increasingly a focus of education research, but also to the variability in how they interpret those emotions to construct experiences that both reflect past learning and shape future learning. The research implications for policy and practice concern effective educational environments that can promote the development of scholarly thinking and belonging by leveraging emotion. The studies described in this chapter focus on social and cultural forces that shape development. Though the empirical evidence from schools is mainly psychological rather than neural at this point, the educational research findings are better understood when taken together with the neural laboratory work that reveals the hidden neurobiological mechanisms.
