Professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang on "The Neuroscience of Social and Emotional Learning"

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, episode #100—this episode is a very special one, that comes full circle for all of the listeners who have ever wondered, “what exactly is the neuroscience of social and emotional learning?” You can watch the interview on YouTube here.  Today, this question will be solved with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who is a Professor of Education, Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE)[i]. She studies the psychological and neurobiological development of emotion and self-awareness, and connections to social, cognitive and moral development in educational settings. What I find to be powerful about Dr. Mary Helen is that although she is a former public junior-high-school science teacher, who went on to earn her doctorate at Harvard University and has received numerous awards for her work and research, she is able to set us straight when it comes to understanding how the emotions we have with others, and our social interactions can change our brain, and literally shape who we are, with powerful findings that she can prove with FMRI scans. Welcome Mary Helen, it’s beyond incredible to finally have this opportunity to speak with you, after studying your work when I first started on this mission to learn and understand the basics of neuroscience back in 2015 when an educator urged me to take this path to integrate neuroscience into the programs I had developed for the school market. I’m sure I first saw you speaking somewhere with Dr. Daniel Siegel, who we had on with episode #28[ii] on “Mindsight: The Basis of Social and Emotional Intelligence” then when I saw you come on his PEPP MWE UP Community Chats this past July[iii], I immediately reached out to speak with you when I saw that your life’s work provides the evidence for the powerful connection with neuroscience and social and emotional learning. Thank you so much for being here today. Dr. Daniel Siegel said this, and I have to repeat it, because your research truly has shown incredible pioneering and achievement when it comes to showing through your social-emotion experiments, how what we think, feel and the emotions that we have—can physically change the structure of our brains. I am so grateful to have you here today and after writing your questions, I decided that it made perfect sense to have your interview as the 100th episode, to show the impact that we can have when we connect neuroscience to social and emotional learning. Q1: You said it really well on Dan’s event, and I have put this link in the show notes so you don’t have to repeat what you said there, but can you share how you started to look at the connection with the social and emotional brain. You mention that in 2001/2002 there wasn’t much out there on culture and the brain, and then when you looked at emotion, it was just some basic stuff about the amygdala lighting up with certain emotions, and the social brain was still in its infancy. Where did this idea begin to work with Antonio Damasio[iv] measuring brain activity and connecting our relationships and emotions to our future results? My thoughts: When I was urged by a school administrator to write another book that included the most current brain research to the programs I was offering schools in Arizona through a Character Education Grant, I began to look for those who were out in the world, teaching educational neuroscience. I found Judy Willis, and Dan Siegel, David Sousa who was showing how the brain learns to read, and some others, but wanted to find those who saw how neuroscience connected to social and emotional learning (the name of the podcast) because I saw how these social skills were changing the results of students, I just wasn’t measuring their brains in FMRI scanners. Your work really is bringing the research to re-think the next g