ABSTRACT
This chapter explains some psychological ideas such as the 'universality' of emotion, mentalising, the physiology of emotion, emotional intelligence, affect, empathy, and sociopathy. The study of emotion is an important topic in psychology, but within education studies it is less prominent. The chapter begins with ideas about 'emotion', and followed by a discussion of why it is important for those involved in the study of education to take account of 'emotional states'. Human emotionality theory proposes that all humans have the capacity to feel and display emotion. Paul Ekman's work also suggested that the human ability to recognise and interpret emotions in others is innate. The hormone which is important for the regulation of emotion is cortisol, whose production and regulation can be linked to learner behaviour. Daniel Goleman proposed that there is an emotional dimension to intelligence that can be measured, and he called this emotional intelligence.
