David Boulton: It’s a pleasure to have this chance to speak with you. Perhaps we can begin with a sketch of who you are and how you’ve come to the work you do.

Personal Background:

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Sure, sure. So let me give you a little background. I’m the Bennett Chair of Prevention Research here at Penn State, and the Director of the Prevention Research Center. I’m trained as a developmental psychopathologist, a person who is interested in normal development and abnormal development, and how we can learn about and understand both of those together.

My interest in psychology came late. As an undergraduate I had little interest in it, until I met Mary Ainsworth, who studied attachment in babies. I became fascinated with the issue of how personality develops. As a result, I went to graduate school. And in graduate school studied attachment processes in young children with Bob Marvin. During my clinical training, I began to see children who were deaf and in most cases had very little speech and very little ability to hear.

At that point in the middle ’70s, there was a great deal of restriction on deaf children, and they were only taught to speak. But research had just been developing regarding deaf children of deaf parents. They only represent about five percent of all deaf children, because most deafness is either not genetic or it’s recessive rather than dominant. So, most deaf children are born in the unusual situation of almost never having deaf parents. But there is a small group of deaf parents that have deaf children. And when you look at their development, what you find is they develop more maturely, both socially, emotionally and academically. And it appears that a central reason is because they get sign language early, as an early natural language from their parents.

So I became interested in the new movement that was happening in the ’70s, which was allowing deaf children of hearing parents to begin to have early sign language input. The first early intervention programs in America had just begun to teach hearing parents and their deaf child sign language. My first research in this area examined whether the attachments between children that had early sign language and oral deaf children would be different. And that’s how my interest in this issue of emotional development and language began. What the findings indicated was that deaf children that had sign language early – back then we called it “total communication” – turned out to have more secure attachments to their parents, and their partners were less stressed, and their development was proceeding more effectively.

Now, things have changed a lot since then. We have cochlear implants and lots of other things going on in deafness. But I became interested, then, in following deaf children over time, preschoolers. And as I followed them into the school age, and I looked at young deaf adults, what I found is they had substantial social emotional deficiencies, which were not caused by deafness itself. It wasn’t the hearing loss that was causing the problem. It wasn’t a processing problem, it was the environments that they were growing up in. They had impoverished language for emotions. Because they were deaf, they couldn’t overhear things and they had much lower rates of incidental learning in everyday life.

As a result, I became interested in developing preventative interventions to promote the social emotional development of children, and specifically deaf children. In 1980, we began with the first version of the PATHS Curriculum. It stands for Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies. Now PATHS is recognized as one of the Blueprints for Violence Prevention and used in thousands of classrooms around the world. But at that point we were only interested in deaf children, and we developed a version in which we focused a lot on language and making language visible. So there are many things that we did in that early work for deaf children that turns out work very well for hearing children, having people talk out loud to themselves, having visual cues of words different places, et cetera, was very effective in cuing them in to the use of language, especially the language of emotions, and demonstrating that language can be used as a model – as a technique for reflection. What John Dewey talked about in the 1890s, Lev Vygotsky talked about it as a “second signal system.” But it’s this ability to have language creating a distance between your impulse to act and the action itself.

So I became interested in how language was related to social emotional development. And over time we’ve done many, many projects on this. We’ve done randomized trials with hearing children, deaf children, special needs children, children that are typically developing, all showing that when you develop high quality social emotional curriculum that could be used by teachers in the classrooms, you train teachers well, that you can develop improved social emotional competence as well as reducing problems, that is, reducing aggressive behavior, reducing depressive symptoms.

We have also been interested in the neuroscience correlates of these developments; that is, we believe that what we’re affecting when we teach children social emotional skills are the connections between the emotion centers of the brain and the frontal lobe. And as a result, I’ve written about the neuroscience issues in the field of prevention, although, I’ve only measured them very modestly, at best. But we have been able to show, for example, that children who improve more in their behavior when they are randomized to get this PATHS Curriculum, are children who also are showing improvements in their executive functions and their ability to show more effective inhibitory control and planning. I believe that that’s partly the result of the fact that they are learning to talk to themselves as they plan action, that the ability to use language to regulate behavior is probably one of the primary criteria of maturity, at least in our western culture.

David Boulton: That’s a great place to start, one that ties it all together. We’re interested in what we call “self-talk-story”, too, – how it is that children learn to talk to themselves.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Right.

David Boulton: And so, what I hear you drawing attention to is how that self-talk is enabled by a certain level or quality of language that the child has. And to the extent that they have an impoverished internal vocabulary or communication system, their ability to communicate with themselves and others is constrained, which has an impact on their social and emotional development.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right.

David Boulton: I’m reminded of one of our other interviewees – Terrence Deacon – I don’t know if you’ve read his work, The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. He makes the point that language has become so powerful and important to us as an organism that children born with less than a whole brain will still develop a pathway through their brain to…

Dr. Mark Greenberg: to language

David Boulton: …to language.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Yeah.

David Boulton: It’s got that kind of force driving its development.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Yeah.

David Boulton: And I imagine it has an incredibly important emotional meaning associated with it, developmentally, and that there would be profound emotional consequences later if it’s not developing right.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right.

David Boulton: So let’s go deeper into that point.

Language and Emotion:

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Sure. Well, one entry to thinking about the developmental relationship between communication and emotion. That’s one of the wonderful ways in. Freud said that the only relationship you can have in your life that isn’t ambivalent is with a baby, because babies are completely present with you all the time and they tell you exactly how they feel every moment. In a momentary fashion their emotions are changing, they’re kicking their feet, they’re moving their bodies, they’re changing their facial expressions; they can’t lie. There’s no screen – a baby doesn’t think, “Well, I think I should wait five minutes before I tell my mother I’m angry, or I’m upset, or I’m scared.” They just literally show all their emotions as they act. Action and emotion are one phenomenon for a baby.

So as children begin to develop representational skills, including language, and they have another form of communication. They have this paralinguistic emotional communication in their bodies and faces, and now they have talk, they have language, symbolic representation. But while by eighteen months they have their first fifty words, and then language develops dramatically quickly after that – language is only serving one function at that point. And that function is to communicate to other people. Language is not yet truly serving a function of self communication. And that awaits the next phase which we think is somewhere between three and four years of age. It varies by child, so there are big individual differences.

But this is what Lev Vygotsky called the “second signal system,” or John Dewey talked about the “role of talk”. The issue here is now talk is not just to tell other people things, it’s to tell yourself things. And you see this in working with parents and being a parent. Trying to talk down a two or three-year-old that’s having a temper tantrum doesn’t work. As much as we’d like to use inductive discipline and talk to them, when a two-year-old is very upset, you really have to hold them or distract them, take them away from the situation. You can’t really talk them out of their emotion. In fact, it’s very hard to do that with adults many times. [laughs] But it’s not possible with two-year-olds, and that’s because when they’re upset and their emotions are coursing through their brain, the cognitive capacity to listen to language or to talk to themselves about what’s happening is just not present.

Somewhere between age three and four, this magic change begins to occur, in which children now begin to use language to represent things to themselves as they’re actually happening. And a perfect example of this is in our research we often use what’s call the “strange situation,” which is a laboratory situation to assess the quality of attachment in which the mother and the child are separated. And the mother plays with the child, and then leaves the room, and the child is in the room by themselves. And it’s often upsetting to them. Their heart rates are going up. Some are concerned where there mother is, even though she know she’s coming back. And some of them will begin to get a little weepy. But oftentimes they’ll look in the one-way mirrors we’re using to film through, and then they’ll say to themselves something like, “My mommy is coming back.” Or they’ll start to sing to themselves. They are using self-talk to manage their emotions.

David Boulton: Self-soothe.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Self-soothe, exactly. And this is the culmination of a major change in development, which is the ability to self-talk, which we think is related to now having the language centers of the brain and the frontal lobes take action to regulate affect, so that when people get very upset they can start to try to talk themselves down.

This developmental process is a key to our work in the PATHS Curriculum with four and five-year-olds, which is to teach them how to stop themselves, to stop and calm down when they begin to become upset. We do that by having them do both motor activities – we call it “doing turtle,” or for deaf children using the sign for turtle. The idea is partly to use motor activity that will not get you in trouble. The second is to take a deep breath through your nose, which is bringing down the heart rate. The third component is we tell children to tell themselves inside to stop, and then to ask themselves how are they feeling. So we’re using motor activity, we’re using heart rate regulation, and we’re using talk all together to help children move to that stage, and we’re seeing for the first time, rather than rolling on the floor when they’re upset, they’ll stamp their foot and say, “I’m angry. I’m really angry.” And by saying that, by using language, it can oftentimes – not always – but oftentimes substitute for that rolling around on the floor and having the tantrum.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Right. So this is the change. This is the change we’re interested in in early childhood. You know the book by Robert Fulghum, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? Well, its very similar to the psychoanalytic ideas, like Freud’s, that personality is formed by around age four or five. That is because it’s around that age that people gain the ability to have self-control, to monitor their behavior, to begin to use a language of emotions to understand that other people have different feelings, thoughts and perspectives than they do, and that they need to coordinate those two. And that’s the major sea change of development.

Self-Reflexivity:

David Boulton: That’s very interesting and remarkable. What you’re describing seems to be a recapitulation of the process that made us human, in the sense that we went from a kind of instrumental use of language, as an external utility, to this verbal self-reflexivity, this “I am” from which we developed the skills and capabilities to interrupt and modulate ourselves in ways that weren’t just instinctive or automatic pilot.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. I think you’re right. This verbal self-reflexivity may recapitulate evolutionary processes, I believe, because it’s likely that language was first used for communication with others rather than for self-regulation. And now we’ve moved to a civilization, to a culture in which the self is paramount, and self-regulation is paramount, it’s even more necessary. Even in the past twenty or thirty years we see a major change in modern western cultures compared to less technological cultures in the need for the self to manage things. We live in a very complex society.

Self-Management:

So for example, even when I was a child I didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble. When I was a child, getting in trouble was something that would happen as soon as I’d misbehaved, because there were so many connections between my father and my mother and then my teachers, my neighborhood, the business people in our neighborhood, that as soon as something happened, they’d find out right away. I didn’t have to worry so much about my own self-regulation, because I knew I was also being regulated by the people around me. And that’s how most all communities in which humans have developed work. That is, until very recently, children were known to everyone – adults were known to everyone in the community. And if someone had a deficiency in this behavior or that behavior, they didn’t have very good self-control, or they tended to be more impulsive, or they tended to be sadder more of the time, people were watching them all the time and helping them to regulate themselves.

In our very modern technological culture, we now have to manage ourselves probably more than we are evolutionary constructed to do so. We’re a culture of community, but we primarily live now in cultures of self. I think that’s very problematic– we’re asking children at younger ages, and adults, even, to do things that probably are very difficult for most of us to do, given the way we’re constructed.

David Boulton: And our wiring, as it’s evolved, as it’s developed, didn’t set us up to do this; this is pretty much learned.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: This is pretty much learned, I believe. Now, that’s not to say that even thousands of years ago we didn’t have the ability to have self-control. In fact, we know from our religious traditions that the ability to have self-control, to transcend normal consciousness, was always present in the human condition.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: But the ability for everyone, for people at all levels of ability to be able to manage themselves in ways that they can be successful and optimize their development is very complicated given the rapid rates at which our culture changes.

David Boulton: Well, the distinction being that in the past we lived in an enmeshment with a community or a tribe or a group that was giving us more coherent feedback about what it was that we were doing. And now we live in a more fragmentary relationship with lots of different people, and we don’t have the same degree of reflection back from people, which informs how we develop self-control…

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. So we’ve placed a greater responsibility on the self, and at earlier and earlier ages. I see this happening even in, I would say, the last twenty to thirty years. As children are going to school earlier, they’re leaving the family culture, in that sense, earlier on in life. And I think it’s part of what we’ve often called the “American question”” that is, how early we can do things. I think, given the individualistic nature of our culture–much of which we don’t even realize — because it’s unconscious to us — is that we have placed more and more stress on the self’s ability to regulate at earlier and earlier ages. But paradoxically, when we help children to regulate at earlier ages, they’re pretty good at it. But we should understand this is not the normal context of the development of our species, or even a normal context of the development in most cultures of the world right now.

David Boulton: Right. And as you point out, we do want to help children develop earlier, better, self-regulation. And, at least it is something that they can feel in the reflection of other people. It isn’t as abstract or artificial as some of the other challenges we’re heaping on them at the same ages.

Teaching Self-Control:

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. I mean, all cultures have encoded ways to help children develop self-control. And there are also games. For example, we have games in American culture, part of the, basically, European tradition, like “Mother May I,” “Musical Chairs,” “Red Light Green Light.” I remember when I was a child, I’d play Red Light Green Light with my grandmother until it got dark at night, where I’d try to slink across the yard before she’d turn her head. And I remember in kindergarten we would play musical chairs. All the chairs would be set up in the middle of the room, we’d all run around the chairs, and when the music stopped, we’d all get to a chair. We’d laugh, it was lots of fun. But it was a self-control training game.

And all cultures have these mechanisms and cultural games that train these skills. [laughs] If we had a way for education to train these skills, it’d probably be much more difficult. But there are lots of games that children play all the time that are games about self-control. It’s a fun skill to learn. It’s a skill that gives children a sense of competence. And what we find is when we teach kids these skills in the PATHS Curriculum, or other kinds of social-emotional curriculums, the children get a great sense of confidence, they feel more mature, they feel more in control of themselves. And that’s a very powerful, positive feeling.

David Boulton: Right. One of the things I got when you were describing PATHS was that in addition to helping children develop these self-talk methods, it’s also dis-entraining the kind of automatic propulsion that would otherwise happen from triggering off whatever was going on.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right.

David Boulton: And these games provide an analogous mechanism of turn taking–of bumping up against failure or frustration or something not going right–but learning to deal with that without necessarily going off the end.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. So one of the goals of teaching children to be more social- emotionally competent is not making sure that they’re always happy, or that everybody feels good. The point is the most important thing in our development from a social-emotional standpoint is to learn how to put into words what feelings we have, to ourselves and others, because when those feelings can be put into words, they can be known and they can be managed.

So for example, there are many emotions that are confusing to us, even as adults at times. For example, it’s often much more comfortable for most people to feel angry than it is other emotions, because anger is an emotion that, for biological reasons, makes us strike out. Our heart rate goes up, we tense, we want to act out. Anger makes you want to punch, fight, to push away. And that’s a very comfortable emotion for many people. It’s often much easier to tell someone you’re angry than it is to say you’re quite disappointed.

Misidentifying Emotions:

It’s often the case that we misidentify anger. So for example, we’ll often see people who are feeling jealous, and we’ll misperceive them as feeling angry. Now, if you feel jealous, but people think you feel angry, they’re going to treat you much differently. If you understand what jealousy is as a child and can identify when you’re feeling jealous, and then tell people you’re feeling jealous of them rather than angry at them, they’re going to treat you much differently.

Even in adulthood, of course, we have the problem of misidentifying feelings all the time. It’s one of the major issues in adult relationships. A perfect example is the issue of feeling shy versus conceited. When people are quite shy, they don’t strike up conversations and oftentimes other people will perceive them as being conceited, or they’ll attribute to them an emotion that’s radically different from shyness, and as a result, treat them much differently. So the ability to both recognize and put emotions into words has enormous power.

We did a study of about 300 second, third and fourth graders, in which we interviewed them about emotions. We asked them to talk about different emotions. We looked at a developmental understanding of emotions and their level of behavior problems. We matched them on reading achievement and IQ. And then we looked at kids who had high, medium and low behavior problems as reported by teachers in their classrooms. What we found was, even when we equated them for reading ability and for IQ, what we found was that, the children who had more behavior problems were less able to talk about emotions.

The children who are having the behavior problems are the ones that usually show their emotions much more often. They’re the ones who are often more angry, more jealous, more sad, more upset. So the ability to feel a lot of emotions is not the same thing as the ability to communicate about them, to talk about them, or reflect on them.

David Boulton: To be able to modulate more finely because of your ability to reflect on emotions and communicate them.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. So self-reflectivity, is a developmental skill here that many children learn naturally, but many don’t, as we know by the rates of behavior problems in our culture and addiction problems. The ability to know how you feel, to be able to plan ahead so you can manage your feelings effectively.

David Boulton: And ‘planning ahead’ is also constructed out of language.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right, yeah.

David Boulton: I mean, the difference between the baby that doesn’t lie and someone who does… you could almost say the baby lives in a comparatively absolute now.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. We’ve shown this with the effects of the PATHS Curriculum, on children’s teacher-rated, externalizing behavior and internalizing problems. Children–who are randomized to get the classroom that has the PATHS Curriculum compared to those that don’t–over time are reported to have lower behavioral problems and less withdrawal, depression and anxiety. Findings also show that this is mediated by changes in their planning abilities. So for example, even though we’ve never taught them anything in the PATHS Curriculum about planning in a cognitive situation–

David Boulton: In an explicit, mechanical way….

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Explicit, right.

David Boulton: …but nonetheless it’s implicit in–

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Right. We find significant effects on the Mazes Task of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, which is a task – a timed task–so there’s some anxiety involved. And there’s emotion involved in everything, but especially in timed tasks. They have to represent, with blocks, pictures – they have to move blocks to make them look exactly like blocks on the picture. And this ability, of course, is often mediated by the ability to talk to yourself, to plan ahead. So you’re looking at this block, you’re looking at the picture, and you’re saying to yourself, “Well, I think I need to rotate it this way,” or, “It doesn’t look quite right.” And that self-regulative talk is part of the success in doing the task.

What we show is that children who have a better social-emotional development, especially as a result of intervention, do significantly better on those tasks, even though they’ve never been trained. And that ability to do better on these tasks is what partially explains the effects on children’s anxiety and depression.

David Boulton: That makes perfect sense.

A Critical Developmental Window:

I’d like to step back to this critical developmental window that this is happening in. This is important because the country seems to be racing towards universal Pre-K and wants to reach down through some generalization that looks like it’s four years old or so. In some respects it’s an important step for the system as a whole to recognize the importance of helping children earlier. On another level, the trajectories that we’re talking about are forming–and in really important ways have been forming–long before we can reach them institutionally. I want to draw that out in terms of both what you said about early language development, the vocabulary explosion and its relationship to self, the beginning of turning inward to self-reflectivity, and that critical time window. Let’s expand this critical developmental window when all this is happening.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Well, there are many changes including a rapid expansion of language and the ability to take other people’s points of view, to begin to have self-control, to begin to do what we call “social problem solving,” to recognize that you have a problem, and that rather than just habitually respond to it, that you can actually think, “I could do this, I could do this, I could do this.” These all happen around the ages of three and a half to five. We see these rapid changes in development, which we believe are related to changes in the neural connections, the large growth of connections between the frontal lobe and the other aspects of the brain, both language centers and the emotion centers of the brain. And that’s why the frontal lobe is called “executive function,” because it is the executive that integrates emotion, reasoning, language aspects, and makes decisions based on all those characteristics, and then sends it to the motor neurons for action.

So this dramatic change that begins–just begins–between three and five in frontal lobe development, is something that’s going to slowly develop now across time. There was a belief until recently that the frontal lobe may mature by ages twelve or thirteen, but it’s now clear that it’s the last maturing part of the brain. It won’t mature until the twenties, we believe, and therefore it’s the part of the brain that’s most affected by experience. It’s the least genetically determined part of our self, if you will, and therefore, the most likely to be modified by what parents do, what teachers do. Families, schools, peer relations, the nature of our communities, etc. are all shaping the frontal lobe’s development.

David Boulton: So in that sense, it’s more like the center of our learning, in a way, in that it’s regulating how we are present and interacting with things that we’re encountering, but it’s not as driven by our genetic neurobiology as by our experiences.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. The frontal lobe really truly is the center of experience, in a sense. It’s taking all experience in, it’s making decisions about how to react to it. And that’s what makes us more and more able – that’s what makes seven-year-olds able to sit in the classroom in spite of the fact that they may be bored or angry. It’s what allows us to sit in a lecture hall all day and listen to speakers in spite of the fact that we may be fantasizing about being on the beach. A two-year-old doesn’t do that. A two-year-old gets up out of the chair and walks away. But this frontal lobe ability allows us to have more and more ability to manage ourselves, to know how we feel at the same time, and to manage our behavior to meet the needs of a current task.

That’s why we don’t have desks in kindergartens and in preschools, and we shouldn’t have them, because children are not ready to sit at desks. It doesn’t meet the needs of their fundamental activity at their age. Most seven-year-olds can sit at a desk for reasonably long periods of time because their frontal lobe has developed enough now that they can monitor and sustain their attention. In spite of the fact that they want to go out to the playground and play, they can still maintain attention for a relatively long period of time. A three-year-old doesn’t do that.

David Boulton: Is there a correspondence between the explosion of language at three to five years old and what you’re describing?

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s a good question. I don’t know that there’s explicit research showing that there’s a relationship between the explosion in language and these changes in the frontal lobe, but it’s very likely that that’s the case.

David Boulton: I would think that some of your work with deaf children and the differences you experienced there would shed some light on that.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Well, the fact that deaf children are behind in many of these social-emotional tasks is probably in part due to language, because they are not different in their other cognitive abilities. Most deaf children fundamentally are normal in every way except they can’t hear. And as a result of not hearing, they have less language, they have less vocabulary, et cetera. So where you can’t unquestionably attribute the social emotional immaturity to the absence of language, it’s very likely.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: The more language we have, the better.

David Boulton: I am not thinking of language as a phenomenon, but in this case as the mediator of the conversation that’s going on inside–

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right.

David Boulton: –that builds up to this level of having reflection, control, regulation and so forth, that’s also building up the frontal lobes.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. There is some controversy about this. Some Piagetians believe that symbols can do the same things without language. But Hans Furth, for example, was a cognitive psychologist who studied deaf children. He believed that deaf children could do many of the things that Piaget talked about such as concrete operations, independent of the fact of that they didn’t have language. But the more we studied this, the more we realized that language is an essential component here.

And very interesting research on theory of the mind, for example–what we used to call “perspective taking” in the ’70s, or the ability to take another person’s point of view or understand that different minds have different theories of action–clearly this is all at least partly mediated by the ability to talk and the explosion in language.

Different Language Environments:

David Boulton: So to that extent then, what I want to do now is come in from another angle. Let’s connect the Hart-Risley domain of work, relative to different developmental trajectories based on language exposure. And in particular, one of the points that they make, which bears on our conversation today, is the differences in ‘kinds of talk’……the business-talk versus the open-ended, turn taking, extensional modes of conversation, and the affect qualities of those two–

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right.

David Boulton: –such that parents who are more taciturn are basically creating an environment where there’s a much greater relative percentage of negative emotional stuff going on. How the volume of language, and then the kinds of language, is affecting children’s trajectories, which feeds into where we just were.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: That’s right. Well, there’s no question that the amount of language input a child gets is critically important. We know that, for example, low-income children are exposed to much less communication. They hear fewer words, and that dramatically affects their experience. This is one of the major roles of early childhood education in America. Head Start programs create an environment in which children are exposed to lots of language, and not only just the amount of language, but the richness of it. Because language is not just about getting people to do things, “Come here, come there,” but it’s about explaining experience. The more that we use inductive language to explain experience and to encourage children to express themselves openly, the more likely they are to develop better language skills, as well as increase their cognitive abilities, because language and cognition, in that sense, can’t be separated at this age.

Emotionally Meaningful Language:

David Boulton: Something I found interesting, relative to theory of mind work, is Patricia Kuhl’s work on the development of children in relation to qualities of parentese they get and how the power of language is connected to its affective meaning. Children can be in a room with a television set on where there’s all kinds of language happening, but it doesn’t have the same meaning for them–it’s not as rich, they’re not pulled into it. The person – the connection–isn’t there, so it’s not just language, it’s language happening in the channel of importance at an emotional level.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Right.

David Boulton: Right. So maybe you could speak to that.

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Well, you know, Piaget talked about emotion and cognition. What he said is that there is no cognition without emotion. What he said, basically, is that all cognition and action is driven by people’s emotions. So to the extent that we’re in situations that are emotionally warm, emotionally stimulating, we’re likely to learn better. And so language– when we embed language in its emotional context–is very important.

We know that when children hear language on television it may build their vocabulary but it doesn’t build their ability to express themselves. Expression is a result of a reciprocal relationship in which there’s turn taking, and in which there’s emotional warmth. The more comfortable a child feels, especially when they’re younger, the more they’ll talk. And when they don’t feel comfortable, they clam up. So the ability to have a warm, reciprocal, secure relationship for children is critical to the opening up of this flower of language. Language is contextual just like everything else, and emotion drives both children’s cognitive abilities and their language abilities.

Language, Emotion and Reading – How Early?:

Three Levels to Consider:

Emotions Consume Processing Bandwidth:

Unnatural Confusion:

Learning Differences:

Emotional Aversion to Confusion:

Brain Imaging:

Different Codes:

Emotional Reading Experiences:

Dr. Mark Greenberg: Okay. So let’s think about this a minute. An important part of reading is hearing rich language, and an important part of hearing rich language in our culture is being read to. Almost all books that we read to children are about characters that have emotions that are going up and down and all around. We, as adults, escape into novels. And the reason why we escape into novels is we’re able to vicariously live the emotional lives of others. That’s what makes fiction so exciting to both children and adults.

Children who are read to regularly, and who have adults, teachers and parents who discuss what they’ve read, learn the richness of books. And this learning of the richness of books is very important early on to help children want to approach text and feel that, even though it’s a struggle to learn this, there’s something rich in there–there’s a vein in there that they want to strike.

When we do social-emotional curriculums in the classroom, it’s very important that we tie these together. We don’t think about the social-emotional development of a child in that curriculum, and the language and reading as being separate curricula. The goal here is to tie them all together to make a really rich curriculum in which children don’t know if they’re learning to read or they’re learning to know about themselves and others–there’s just a process of learning occurring. I would recommend that you check out the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) to find out more about the connection between social and emotional learning and academic achievement

And so we spend a lot of time in our social-emotional work linking it to literacy, trying to make those bridges very clear so that we pick books for children that are both good books from a vocabulary standpoint, if you will–they have the right words in them given the children’s developmental needs–but that engage the children in the process of thinking about both the characters and themselves.

PATHS Curriculum: