Dr. Immordino-Yang: How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning

In this episode, my guest is Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, EdD, professor of education and psychology at the University of Southern California and director of the Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education, who has done groundbreaking research on emotions, self-awareness and social interactions and how these impact the way we learn and change across our lifespan. She explains how an understanding of emotions can be leveraged to improve learning in children and in adults, and how the education system should be altered to include new forms of exploration and to facilitate better learning and to include more diverse learning (and teaching) styles. This episode ought to be of interest to anyone interested in how we learn, human development in children and adults, as well as those generally interested in education, psychology or neuroscience.

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

• USC Academic Profile
• USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education
• Emotions, Learning, and the Brain (Book)
• YouTube
• TEDx talk
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Articles

• Neural correlates of admiration and compassion (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
• Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages (Human Brain Mapping)
• Default and executive networks’ roles in diverse adolescents’ emotionally engaged construals of complex social issues (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience)
• Cultural differences in the neural correlates of social–emotional feelings: an interdisciplinary, developmental perspective (Current Opinion in Psychology)
• Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
• How People Learn II (The National Academies Press)
• The Smoke Around Mirror Neurons: Goals as Sociocultural and Emotional Organizers of Perception and Action in Learning (Mind, Brain and Education)
• Outcomes via Brain Network Development (PsyArXiv)
• Sages and Seekers: The development of diverse adolescents’ transcendent thinking and purpose through an intergenerational storytelling program (PsyArXiv)