Emotions and Education: Analysis of the Benefits and Risks of Human Development

Dear Colleagues,

Because of the acceleration of social, cultural and historical change, the presence of emotions throughout human development is a question of unavoidable interest. Thus, from an integrative perspective, human development and emotional development are closely connected. Evolutionary Psychology defines human development as evolution toward overall personal growth. Its analysis from an educational and social perspective considers the individual the main axis of attention, who must be offered opportunities for balanced integral development, which emphasizes the importance of education in the development of the human being. The consensus of a multitude of lines of research shows that study of the inner human being is necessary, leading to observation and evaluation of people’s behavior throughout their life cycle, not only, in the light of an intelligence quotient, but also, a balanced emotional quotient. With the emergence of Emotional Intelligence, the study of human development is approached from a dynamic perspective of the person as an evolutionary and interactive being, for which the development of adequate emotional bonds becomes necessary. This enables phenomena of change to be analyzed, asking ourselves what factors influence emotional experience, or on the contrary, how or how intensely emotions influence other factors present during development. And if this is the case, how can it be measured? Or intervened in? Starting out from these and other general questions, we propose a complete analysis of the place held by the emotion-education binomial in human development. We say “binomial”, because from an integrative perspective, one cannot be undertaken without the other. Emotions have much to say about baseline learning (referring to the more than sufficiently demonstrated emotion-cognition relationship) and also social development (facilitating or hindering interpersonal relations) as well as professional (related to the strong impact of such current concepts as burnout or engagement). Meanwhile, in this area of study of the emotions, education adopts a multifaceted role, serving as the context of development, as a variable to be evaluated, or as a tool enabling us to work on improving the emotional experience.

The objective of this Special Issue goes through different points of obligatory reflection, always from a scientific point of view with an empirical and tested basis, among which are: identify the variables related to emotional experience from a two-way orientation, analyze the relationships between them as well as the role of each (cause-effect, mediation, moderation, etc.), develop or adapt evaluation instruments adequate for specific populations or development contexts, transfer the results of empirical research to application contexts through design of intervention programs. In brief, any study where the starting point is analysis of emotions with education in a dynamic position open to change, and human development as the framework for action, in its widest sense, would be appropriate.

Dr. María del Carmen Pérez-Fuentes
Prof. Dr. María Del Mar Molero Jurado
Prof. Dr. José Jesús Gázquez Linares
Guest Editors

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• emotions
• education
• emotional intelligence
• human development