2019/07/03 by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen Immordino‐Yang, Linda Darling-Hammond +3 · 280 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Affordance #Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognition #Cognitive psychology #Cognitive science #Developmental psychology #Early Childhood Education and Development #Emotional development #Interdependence #Neuroscience #Psychology #Social change #Social cognition #Social emotional learning #Social learning #Sociology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/00461520.2019.1633924
published in Educational Psychologist 54(3), 185-204 (Routledge)
openalex publication_date 2019/07/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
New advances in neurobiology are revealing that brain development and the learning it enables are directly dependent on social-emotional experience. Growing bodies of research reveal the importance of socially triggered epigenetic contributions to brain development and brain network configuration, with implications for social-emotional functioning, cognition, motivation, and learning. Brain development is also impacted by health-related and physical developmental factors, such as sleep, toxin exposure, and puberty, which in turn influence social-emotional functioning and cognition. An appreciation of the dynamic interdependencies of social-emotional experience, health-related factors, brain development and learning underscores the importance of a “whole child” approach to education reform and leads to important insights for research on social-emotional learning. To facilitate these interdisciplinary conversations, here we conceptualize within a developmental framework current evidence on the fundamental and ubiquitous biological constraints and affordances undergirding social-emotional learning–related constructs and learning more broadly. Learning indeed depends on how nature is nurtured.