2017 Speaker Series on Education
Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang 
Emotions, Learning and the Brain: What educators need to know about the power of feelings

Please join us for our seventh annual Speaker Series on Education featuring Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

Social emotions like admiration and compassion shape how we think and act, who we become, and how we experience our own lives. Studies of these emotions’ neurobiological underpinnings also reveal important insights about the nature of deep learning and how social experience shapes intellectual development. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang will present her research on the neurobiology and psychology of emotional feelings, including their deep visceral roots in the feeling and regulation of the body and consciousness, their propensity to heighten one’s own subjective sense of self-awareness and purpose, and their connections to memory, cultural learning and the development of interests and expertise. Her studies underscore the fundamental interdependence of emotion and cognition, and the necessity of understanding students’ humanity to optimally support their academic excellence.

MARY HELEN IMMORDINO-YANG is a social-affective neuroscientist and human development psychologist who studies social emotion and self-awareness across cultures, connections to cognition, resilience and morality, and implications for education. She is the author of Emotion, learning and the brain: Exploring the educational implications of affective neuroscience, available from WW Norton (2015).