Emotion,Sociality,and the Brain’s Default Mode Network

Abstract

Education research—for example, on character, stereotype threat, and identity-based motivation—demonstrates that social and emotional factors influence students’ cognitive abilities and academic achievement. In parallel, recent advances in social-affective and cultural neuroscience reveal the social nature of human brain development and neural processing. Neuroscience can inform educational practice and policy by uncovering the mechanisms that may produce the observed social and emotional effects on learning. One major advance shows how the brain’s Default Mode Network supports social-emotional feelings and broader thought patterns associated with self-processing, identity, meaning-making, and future-oriented thought. This article introduces policy makers to this research and its implications for educational decision making.

Keywords

social-emotional learning (SEL)stereotype threat identity achievement motivation grit

Students’ interests and experiences can be powerful motivators, but neuroscience suggests downtime/active reflection is needed to tap them.

Key Points

Educational policy makers need to consider how policies support students’ social-emotional context for learning and, hence, their investment in working hard.

New discoveries about the brain provide insights into social-emotional processing and help explain why many common educational practices undermine achievement over time.

The brain network that supports social-emotional aspects of personal memory, future-oriented thinking, and conceptual understanding deactivates during task-oriented focus.

It is not neurologically possible to simultaneously devote full attention to completing one’s current tasks while also reflecting on the broader meaning of those tasks now and into the future.

Reflecting on the broader meaning of tasks helps youth engage deeply with academic content, overcome negative stereotypes, and build purpose.

Supported opportunities for interest-driven exploration and constructive reflection facilitate students’ emotional investment and, hence, their hard work and achievement over time.

Introduction

General intelligence does not predict students’ academic and personal success as well as do students’ social-emotional characteristics and executive control capacities. These include in-the-moment regulatory abilities, such as capacities to get going when success is uncertain, to consider alternative paths when an initial course seems blocked, and to persist when tasks become difficult (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Oyserman & Destin, 2010). These capacities also include framing one’s current decisions and actions in terms of their broader implications for one’s life into the future. For example, students with a strong sense of purpose and a clear idea of what they are trying to accomplish, and why, fare better over time (Damon, 2008), as do students inclined to embrace new experiences as opportunities for growth (Kaufman, 2013).

These social-emotional characteristics and executive capacities resemble traits, meaning that some students measure consistently higher on them than others do. But, more relevant for educational policy, these capacities also depend on context: How a task is framed can shape students’ interpretation of it, including whether they construe it as something possible for them to accomplish, important enough to persist on, and relevant to their personal goals. By shaping students’ interpretations of tasks, contexts indirectly influence students’ social-emotional and executive functioning, and hence cognitive performance in the moment and achievement over time (Oyserman, 2015). This means that students’ achievement depends on social-emotional factors and executive control: whether they interpret the situation as supportive (Fischer & Immordino-Yang, 2002) and which aspect of their identity is salient to them in the current social-emotional context (Gresky, Ten Eyck, Lord, & McIntyre, 2005; Rydell & Boucher, 2010; Rydell, McConnell, & Beilock, 2009). For example, a student could understand and use statistics when he is calculating his performance on the basketball court, where his beliefs about his own identity align well with the task at hand. In this context, he feels socially connected and competent, and believes that practice will lead to improvement. But, this same student could fail to demonstrate statistical understanding when he is in math class. In the classroom context, the student’s math ability is lowered because, as a minority male, he feels like an outsider whom many would not expect to succeed. Math seems irrelevant to his life, and so he gives up (Nasir, 2012; Walton & Cohen, 2007).

Just as contexts influence students’ interpretations and therefore performance, schools can also teach students advantageous mindsets through activities that help them reframe their beliefs about themselves and about learning as a growth-oriented process (Yeager & Walton, 2011). Such interventions can sometimes have long-lasting effects on students’ executive skills and academic achievement (Oyserman, Bybee, Terry, & Hart-Johnson, 2004; Yeager & Walton, 2011), boosting success-promoting social-emotional traits over time. Exposure to successful social role models can also have powerful effects (Lockwood, Jordan, & Kunda, 2002), as can offering students opportunities to make choices about how they interact with content or demonstrate mastery (Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008). These strategies enhance students’ emotional investment in academic tasks in part by changing students’ sense of who they are and therefore what seems possible and worth achieving for a person like them.

Because students’ academic performance depends on their subjective interpretations—how they feel about themselves in relation to the task, and how they believe others think about them—schools should be more effective when they support students’ social relationships in academic contexts and foster a culture of connection between students’ academic knowledge and their sense of agency and self-relevance. Given this, what is known about the mechanisms and constraints at play in social-emotional processing that could inform the design of educational policies meant to support student achievement?

Learning is socially embedded, as a century of research in schools and developmental contexts points out (e.g., Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Bruner, 1990; Montessori, 1914/2009; Rogoff, 2003). Now, an expanded set of tools can probe the mechanisms involved in students’ construction of beliefs about self, social-emotional relationships, and possible futures. In particular, new discoveries about the brain provide insights into the neuropsychological mechanisms that support social-emotional processing, self-processing, agency, and how people make meaning of social contextual cues. The new understanding of neuropsychological functioning converges with educational and psychological evidence to offer a clearer picture of the skills students need to be resilient to contexts that could undermine their performance. As these research fields move together, a clearer picture is also emerging of the educational strategies that could promote (or inadvertently undermine) students developing these skills.

The next sections orient readers to the new field of social-affective neuroscience and introduce a discovery relevant to social-emotional functioning: the brain’s so-called Default Mode Network (DMN; Raichle et al., 2001). The overarching aim is to explain that the brain cannot engage instrumental task orientation—working hard on goal-directed schoolwork—while simultaneously interpreting the personal relevance, deeper conceptual significance, and broader future implications of the current task. Because of this, students need focused opportunities for “constructive internal reflection” (Immordino-Yang, Christodoulou, & Singh, 2012)—that is, for developing abilities to think critically about the broader meaning and personal significance of what they are learning. The final section lays out some implications for educational practice and policy.

The Emerging Field of Social-Affective Neuroscience

Just as psychological development, learning, and academic achievement are social-emotional processes, situated within the context of interpersonal relationships and reflecting individuals’ and groups’ emotional experiences, they are also biologically grounded processes, instantiated in the brain. Although early cognitive (neuro)science (in the 1980s) avoided emotion to focus on isolated cognitive functions that deploy independently from their social, emotional, and cultural contexts (Gardner, 1985), over the past 20 years, the tide has turned. Invoking emotion, sociality, subjectivity, and cultural experience is necessary to explain the dynamic nature of human neuropsychological functioning, even in domains traditionally considered “rational,” such as economics and morality (Camerer, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2005; Farah, 2010; Haidt, 2001).

In parallel with the growing focus on social, emotional, and identity-related functioning in education research (Brackett, Rivers, Reyes, & Salovey, 2012; Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2014), a new subfield of neurobiological research on social, affective, and cultural processing has emerged and expanded (Adolphs, 2003; Kitayama & Park, 2010; Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001). This neuroscientific subfield uses techniques that measure neural (brain) and psychophysiological (bodily) processes to addresses questions about how people process social and self-relevant information in their cognitive, emotional, and cultural contexts. Issues studied include, for example, how social relationships influence biological mechanisms and development (e.g., Sebastian et al., 2011; Shonkoff, 2010); how the brain supports a sense of self (e.g., Jenkins & Mitchell, 2011; Northoff et al., 2006), social-emotional feelings (e.g., Immordino-Yang, 2016), and cultural identity (Mathur, Harada, & Chiao, 2012); and how the brain supports inferences about others’ beliefs, goals, values, and expectations (see Adolphs, 2009; Blakemore & Frith, 2004; Kaplan et al., 2016).

Although the applications in education are still being worked out (Immordino-Yang, 2015), even the current understanding of emotion and sociality in education already suggests that the neurobiological work should be relevant to learning environments (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007; Immordino-Yang & Gotlieb, in press; Sebastian et al., 2011). Taking the neuroscientific evidence together with the educational evidence suggests that for educational practice to be maximally effective at supporting learning outcomes, educational policy makers need to consider how policies support students’ social context for learning, and hence their emotional investment in working hard. Advances in neuroscience can inform these considerations by shedding light on the mechanisms that support social-emotional processing in the brain, including their developmental, organizational, and functional constraints. This argument rests on the premise that policies that are consistent with how the brain processes, learns, and develops are more likely to be successful than policies that undermine or are inconsistent with what we know of neural functioning.

Academic Skills Are Sub-Served by Dynamically Changing, Experience-Dependent, Interdependent Networks in the Brain

Recent decades have seen an explosion of research on how the brain works, including how it supports social, affective, and cultural processes. One major discovery, enabled in part by innovations in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technologies and data analysis (Hagmann et al., 2008; Medaglia, Lynall, & Bassett, 2015), is that the cognitive and emotional skills we hope to cultivate and leverage in education are supported by complex, interconnected brain networks, rather than by a collection of discrete neural processors operating independently. These networks dynamically and actively organize as the learner grows and develops, and they grow differently depending on a learner’s experiences, thought patterns, and acquired skills (e.g., Bassett et al., 2011; Posner & Rothbart, 2005).

For example, learning to read is associated with network changes in brain systems involved in language and vision, and in the structural connections between these systems and networks that support emotional intonation in speech and emotional engagement in stories (Dehaene, 2009; Tamir, Bricker, Dodell-Feder, & Mitchell, 2016). Similarly, the development of executive functioning in childhood and adolescence is associated with increased network connections between prefrontal brain regions involved in planning and motor control, and limbic brain regions—such as the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex—involved in threat detection, emotional reactivity, and regulation of arousal (Casey, Jones, & Hare, 2008). The activation of these networks during social interactions is influenced by the quality of children’s and adolescents’ close relationships (e.g., Saxbe, Del Piero, Immordino-Yang, Kaplan, & Margolin, 2016).

A Critical Confluence: The Brain’s DMN Supports Social-Emotional Feelings, Values, and Beliefs; Inferences About Others’ Feelings, Values, and Beliefs; and Integration of Personal Memories With Imagination of Possible Futures

Among many interrelating networks nested in the brain, the most metabolically expensive core brain areas are organized into a grand network whose activity and connectivity (coordinated “cross talk” between the component networks) are broadly associated with neural and mental health, intelligence, and memory ability (see Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008; van den Heuvel, Stam, Kahn, & Hulshoff Pol, 2009). This grand brain network, called the DMN, engages regions not only in the brain’s core but also in key lateral parietal areas (for a review of the social-emotional mental functions and emotion-related physiological regulatory functions of DMN regions, see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Overview of the main brain regions comprising the default mode network (DMN), with brief descriptions of associated socio-emotional mental functions and physiological regulatory functions important for social emotion.

The DMN network was named for the fact that its component brain regions become highly active and functionally connected when people daydream or wakefully rest in the fMRI scanner, compared with when they perform demanding cognitive tasks (Raichle et al., 2001). The discovery of the brain’s DMN was initially puzzling—how could the brain’s most metabolically expensive regions be more active when people are resting?

Today, about 15 years later, scientists broadly accept that—far from simply supporting idle rest—these coordinated DMN activations are critical for psychological functioning, especially for mind states that move the thinker out of the physical, visible, actionable specifics of the here-and-now. The DMN is heavily recruited during all sorts of tasks that involve internally directed, interpretive, and reflective thought, for example, when remembering past experiences, imagining hypothetical or future scenarios, or deliberating on inferred, abstract, or morally relevant information (see Immordino-Yang et al., 2012, for a review; Spreng & Grady, 2010). The DMN is involved in creativity, originality, and out-of-the-box thinking (Beaty, Benedek, Silvia, & Schacter, 2015; Shamay-Tsoory, Adler, Aharon-Peretz, Perry, & Mayseless, 2011); in story comprehension during reading (Koyama et al., 2011; Tamir et al., 2016); in ethical deliberations (e.g., Kaplan et al., 2016); and when individuals think about the future (Gilbert & Wilson, 2007). The DMN is active when people reflect on their own and others’ psychological and moral qualities and values (see Immordino-Yang et al., 2012, for a review), and when they experience complex emotions about others’ psychological qualities and inferred internal emotional experiences, such as when people feel inspired by another’s virtuous accomplishments or feel compassion for another’s emotional pain (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009).

Importantly for educational practice and policy, research has unequivocally shown that the DMN is not equally active all the time. Instead, the DMN seems to trade off with brain networks that support outward attention, physical action, and instrumental task orientation (Fox et al., 2005). For example, the DMN will be relatively quiet and inactive when people engage in mental activities with short-term, context-specific goals, such as solving math problems for practice, listening to the teacher’s instructions, playing sports or action video games, or checking their cell phone. Similarly, the DMN will be relatively deactivated when individuals recognize and label an emotional facial expression (e.g., from a picture; Sreenivas, Boehm, & Linden, 2012), or react emotionally to a person’s physical appearance, skillful performance, or bodily injury (Immordino-Yang et al., 2009). These tasks deactivate the DMN at least temporarily because they require outward perceptual attention.

Hence, the neural networks responsible for maintaining and focusing attention into the environment and engaging in finite, task-directed, and physical activity toggle with the DMN. These two modes of attention—inward reflection supported by the DMN, and outward attention, perception, and action—do not normally co-activate. This means that it is not neurologically possible to simultaneously devote full attention to completing one’s current tasks while also reflecting on the broader meaning of these tasks now and into the future.¹

To Stop and Think, or to Dig in and Work? Supporting a Balanced Brain and Mind

The DMN network is involved in building coherent, social-emotionally relevant narratives about one’s own and others’ values and life experiences. These internal narratives then inform the meaning one makes of situations and decisions going forward, including, presumably, about the importance, identity congruence, and personal relevance of educational tasks (Immordino-Yang et al., 2012; Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007; Immordino-Yang & Gotlieb, in press). Because, as discussed, the meaning attributed to tasks influences whether students persist at them and achieve competence, it seems reasonable to conjecture that relentlessly adjuring students to focus in the here-and-now on completing the concrete tasks given to them could undermine students’ social-emotional meaning-making, identity development, conceptual understanding, and, ultimately, their long-term academic success.

In addition, because the networks of the brain trade off with one another in accordance with the attentional demands of the moment, DMN development is yoked to the healthy development of other brain networks, such as the executive networks that pull attention away from daydreams and onto the current task/context (see Northoff, Duncan, & Hayes, 2010). That is, brain networks supporting inward reflection and outward attention do not develop independently from each other, but in a delicate balance in which their relative up and down regulation must be coordinated and flexible. Because the functioning of networks for inward and outward attention are co-dependent in this way, and because brain network development is shaped by experience, educational practices that overly emphasize momentary task orientation and accountability at the expense of balanced opportunities for reflection and meaning-making may bias cognition and even the relationship between brain networks over time. Specifically, the hypothesis is that youths will be less inclined to consider the bigger picture of academic and social situations, including the longer term and ethical consequences of their decisions and actions, and the utility of academic skills for their future lives. Although this idea is still new and not yet conclusively demonstrated, supportive data from our and others’ laboratories are accumulating (Annisette & Lafreniere, 2016; Immordino-Yang, 2015; Rhoads, Rotenstein, Yang, Riveros, & Immordino-Yang, 2016; Trapnell & Sinclair, 2012).

The logical conclusion, consistent with common sense and a focus of current research, is that educational environments that overly focus on task orientation and quantitative measures of success such as test scores and grades may sometimes increase achievement and productivity in the short-term by focusing teachers on what works now and learners on completing concrete tasks for near-term rewards. But, overly strong task/testing orientation may inadvertently undermine genuine meaning-making, critical thinking, creativity, and well-being over time, leading students to lose (or never to build) intrinsic motivation, resilience, and personal connection to academics and scholastic achievement. Such situations could also exacerbate stereotype and identity-related effects on learning, because students would not have adequate opportunities to develop skills for reflecting on their identity more broadly in threat-inducing situations. Stuck in the moment, their reactions could be more directly influenced by perceived negative cues.

Using the Research to Inform Decision Making in Education

The direct relevance of DMN functioning to educational functioning is difficult to prove directly, given the impracticality of conducting neuroimaging research that captures natural human behavior and thought in the classroom. Nonetheless, the research on DMN functioning has potentially fundamental implications for understanding how people develop and learn in social, emotional, and cultural contexts such as schools, and therefore for how schools could more effectively support learning (Immordino-Yang, 2015). According to the psychological evidence, when students have the skills and opportunities to reflect on their understanding growing over time, to follow and expand their interests, to own their achievements, and to build a sense of future-oriented purposefulness, they are better able to work hard in the present (Damon, 2008; Oyserman, 2015). According to the neuroscientific evidence, these metacognitive and social-emotional skills rely on a brain network whose concerted activation is incompatible in the moment with completing concrete tasks and attention in the immediate environment (e.g., when listening to teachers’ instructions, or when teachers use the popular “all eyes on me!”; Paradise, Mejía-Arauz, Silva, Dexter, & Rogoff, 2014).

The policy implication is that utilizing educational strategies that adaptively leverage the kinds of thinking supported by the DMN could improve academic achievement in the long-term by addressing students’ skills for advantageously interpreting the social-emotional context of tasks, and the meaning tasks have for their understanding, efficacy, and identity going forward. These strategies could, in essence, help students navigate between statistics in the basketball court and in the math classroom, by helping students develop skills and habits for reflecting on their performance in relation to their identity in the two contexts. In the case of the basketball example, such strategies could facilitate this minority male realizing that he is capable of doing math and, thus, socially belongs and should expect to succeed in math class, which in turn will increase his effort when he inevitably encounters difficulty.

Psychological evidence already shows that educational activities that support these kinds of reflections positively impact individuals’ performance in identity-threatening contexts. For example, before a high-stakes test, high school students encouraged to journal about their beliefs regarding the implications of their test performance for their life more broadly overcame anxiety and performed better (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011). Similarly, stereotype threat effects on performance are erased when people are reminded of other, non-stigmatized aspects of their identity (Rydell et al., 2009), for instance, when women taking a math test are reminded to think first about their competence in other personally important domains unrelated to math (Gresky et al., 2005; Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999). The neuroscientific evidence adds insights into how these interventions work, and into what other kinds of interventions are likely to be effective or not (see also Lyons & Beilock, 2012).

The particular policies that would support these educational interventions could take many forms, and would differ depending on the context and needs of the school and students. For example, in high-performing districts where students churn out excessively high volumes of work, policies that limit homework so that students have downtime to reflect and daydream could be useful. In struggling districts in which the students have trouble seeing how school is integral to their future life success, policies supporting the construction of third spaces (see Gutiérrez, 2008) would be consistent with this research. Third spaces are safe “zones of transformation” in which “teachers and students socialize together . . . integrating everyday and academic knowledge” (Mayes Pane, 2009, p. 64). Through the conversations supported by third spaces, students gain open-ended, teacher-scaffolded opportunities to reflect on their identities, hopes, and plans, and to connect their interests, academic opportunities, and real-life outcomes.

Other, more broadly applicable, examples of pedagogies consistent with the research would be those designed to support students’ practical, personal, integrated, and interest-driven demonstrations of expertise, critical thinking, and judgment. For example, pedagogies that utilize students’ creation of portfolios, projects, or performances could be useful, as could opportunities for students to spend time pursuing internships or in-depth projects in their area of interest. When well designed, these approaches encourage students to leverage their interests and basic skills to engage with discipline-specific and world-relevant problems that they care about (and, to learn to care about problems they do not yet know about; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1999; Harris & Alexander, 1998; Walker, Leary, Hmelo-Silver, & Ertmer, 2015). In these approaches, students develop their abilities to envision in open-ended ways what they want to create, test, or show, and then develop skills for reflecting on progress and adapting plans. They engage in reflection alternately with bouts of concrete, task-oriented activity. These opportunities are meant to support students developing a more balanced mind and better executive functioning, in addition to a stronger sense of personal accomplishment, academic connection, and conceptual understanding.

Into the Future: Toward a Social-Emotionally Smarter Education System

Education stakeholders’ and students’ beliefs, emotions, and relationships both prolong, and have the power to ameliorate, many of the most pressing problems currently facing education and society, such as achievement/opportunity gaps, failure to develop a genuine sense of purpose, and others. Each of these problems is rooted in the power of individuals’ and groups’ subjective interpretations of their own and others’ propensities for achievement in specific educational and life contexts. Remediating these problems, therefore, means focusing our educational policy-making efforts not simply on increasing and documenting what skills students can perform competently here and now, but on helping students and all educational stakeholders to understand how and why academic work operates in a process-oriented, socially situated, emotionally relevant way. The emotional connection when students have opportunities and skills to make their learning personally relevant differentiates underperformance, or superficial, rote, topical assimilation of material, from deep mastery and durable learning. Such grounding is also likely what makes individuals resilient to forces like stereotype threat that undermine their achievement.

In sum, corroborating classic education research on how people learn (e.g., Brown et al., 1989), new evidence on brain functioning suggests that many of the mainstream educational practices meant to increase productivity and accountability may be incompatible with how the brain works and how people think, and could inadvertently undermine student achievement and life success (see also Golann, 2015; Goodman, 2013). The evidence backs up what last century’s wise teachers could have told you: Young people need downtime, reflection time, and strong social relationships to learn optimally. Students need structured educational opportunities to make meaning of complex information without interruption, to engage in work that feels relevant to their interests and life, and to formulate opinions and deep understanding of the tasks they engage in. Although many of the pedagogical suggestions are old, understanding the neurobiological mechanism gives us a new appreciation for the urgency. Schools are designed to teach specific procedures and semantic content. But pushing for students’ hard work in the moment without supporting the broader psychological and neurological landscape of the developing person is misguided, because it fails to help students more adaptively interpret their educational experiences in terms of their own identity development and possible futures. Among the most powerful resources educators possess are their students’ own interests and experiences: When we help students learn to value, recruit, and broaden these, we are indirectly helping those students to work harder and to persistently pursue meaningful goals. As early educators would likely have guessed, brain networks supporting social-emotional experiences, deep understanding, identity construction, and future-oriented decision making are intricately and fundamentally intertwined.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: National Science Foundation Faculty Early Development (CAREER) award 1151920 to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

Notes

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Emotion,Sociality,and the Brain’s Default Mode Network

Abstract

Keywords

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Key Points

Introduction

The Emerging Field of Social-Affective Neuroscience

Academic Skills Are Sub-Served by Dynamically Changing, Experience-Dependent, Interdependent Networks in the Brain

A Critical Confluence: The Brain’s DMN Supports Social-Emotional Feelings, Values, and Beliefs; Inferences About Others’ Feelings, Values, and Beliefs; and Integration of Personal Memories With Imagination of Possible Futures

To Stop and Think, or to Dig in and Work? Supporting a Balanced Brain and Mind

Using the Research to Inform Decision Making in Education

Into the Future: Toward a Social-Emotionally Smarter Education System

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Notes

References