Abstract:

Is it possible to teach the pleasure of learning? All educators have faced this question at least once in their lives. Many studies have often been focused on learning motivation, a complex construct that indicates a system of subjective experiences, of intrinsic or extrinsic origin, in which the emphasis is placed on aspects such as objectives, expectations, values, attribution style.

The urge to act is often based on the emotions experienced, so much so that “emotion” and “motivation” have a common Latin root: the word "emotion" contains the verb "moveo" (to move), the word "motivation" refers to "motus" and "actio" (to move towards something). It follows that the motivation to learn is connected to a pleasant emotion and to a feeling of emotional-cognitive well-being.

In this work the link between the learning process and the emotional dimension will be analysed. Research in the field of neuroscience and psychology highlights the interdependence between emotional processes and cognitive processes. This interdependence between emotion and cognition leads to an analysis of the teaching-learning process from the perspective of warm cognition: in short, we place in memory not only the information learned, but also the emotion with which it was learned. When the memory recovers the learned information, this will also be accompanied by the connected emotion. The child who has learned by experiencing an emotion of fear, by retrieving that information from her memory, will also reactivate the fear, in what is called the "emotional short circuit". What are the educational strategies that a teacher can activate to prevent this short circuit and activate paths of pleasure to learning? The final section of this article focuses on this aspect.

Keywords:

Emotion, Learning, Motivation.