Conclusion
Our work has analyzed the impact of an entrepreneurship program implemented in vocational schools in Chile. This entrepreneurship program was designed for individuals to learn from their failures. We find that emotion regulation is the main channel through which the program impacts educational outcomes. A novel feature of our study is the use of EEG recordings as a measure of socio-emotional skills, grounding our discussion of emotion regulation in objective measurements rather than self-reported results, as in earlier studies. To be clear, we do not claim that EEG recordings (or plotting them along arousal and valence indices) record or “read” emotions; rather, these tools serve as useful proxies to measure changes in skills associated with emotion regulation. This promising use of EEG recordings complements recent work that uses cortisol as a physiological measure of psychological well-being in impact evaluationsWe argue that training programs designed to foster socio-emotional skills affect the participants‚ capacity for emotion regulation, which is a unique form of socio-emotional skill. We test our hypothesis in two ways. First, we leverage a randomized controlled trial of an entrepreneurship program designed to foster socio-emotional skills among youth to get exogenous variation in program participation. Second, we use emotion-detection methods drawn from affective neuroscience to obtain unbiased measures of emotion regulation. We also document the limitations of self-reported measures of emotional states.We find that the program has a significant impact on educational outcomes as measured by dropout rates and registration to the college entrance exam PSU. We do not find a significant impact on self-reported socio-emotional skills measures, which is consistent with the findings of previous related studiesOn one hand, we find significant impacts on emotional state at resting state—i.e., a no stimuli condition. Specifically, we estimate a decrease in both arousal and emotional valence indices among participants. After analyzing the results, we establish that the impacts on emotion regulation are likely due to the reappraisal-focused strategies espoused by the program’s rethinking and redoing methodology. Indeed, these strategies have been identified as the most effective for avoiding emotional bias on decision-makingAs mentioned before, the magnitude of our findings are close to the upper bound of similar educational interventionsFrom a methodological perspective, the experimental paradigm adopted for this study provides an alternative to the approaches most frequently employed in the literature: self-reported measures, latent factor models, and the use of revealed behaviors as proxies. The methodology proposed here enabled us to measure emotional disposition and responsiveness by means of EEG recordings. The use of these recordings provides a solution that overcomes the biases related to self-reporting, and the question of whether programs such as the entrepreneurship one studied here impact any unobservable characteristics besides those that were initially targeted. Finally, the use of this methodology is at the cost of having a smaller sample size given all the logistics and technicality involved in the use of EEG devices.