Feeling, fast and slow
MINOR
The link between emotions and cognition has been debated and explored by scholars for centuriesFollowing Kahneman’s ideas, we argue that emotion regulation drives people to behave based more on System 2 than on System 1. System 2, given its more deliberate focus, enables individuals to identify and pursue better outcomes for themselves and others. We argue that the program studied here changes emotion regulation capabilities among participants, essentially pushing them toward behavior closer to System 2, which in turn affects their educational outcomes. In this section, we focus on how to interpret the results on neurophysiological measures and how the program affects emotion regulation. We also discuss why the program affects students‚ “disposition to act” and the economic relevance of our findings when compared to similar programs. We argue that the program affects emotion indices via a reappraisal strategy triggered by learning by failure. This reappraisal strategy, in turn, helps individuals develop a sense of resilience.The behavioral economics literature provides evidence showing that even minor mood manipulations have a substantial impact on outcomes and behaviorThe asymmetry in the impacts of positive and negative emotional states is consistent with other findings in the literature. In Querengasser and Schindler’s workAt first glance, the negative impact on emotional disposition would seem counterintuitive given that the program was designed to improve socio-emotional skills. For instance, changing the attitude toward failure would also change education and labor market decisions, such as efforts put into tasks, occupational choices, entrepreneurship, and the pursuit of creative and original work, among many others. This interpretation is consistent with the impact observed on educational outcome.A core aspect of the program’s methodology was to generate situations in which students had to face failure and reappraise their emotions in such a context. Lerner et al.Finally, it is hard to translate the estimated results into meaningful behavioral explanations. All emotional indices built with the EEG recordings were standardized with respect to the mean and standard deviation of the control group. Since Mathersul et al.There are a number of papers that consider valence or left relative to right (LFA) cortical activity, to build behavioral indices of emotions or motivation. For instance, Hughes et al. examined the relationship between valence and effort expenditure for reward, a behavioral index of approach motivation