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However, seeing our
grandchildren's pictures warms my heart and motivates me to accomplish tasks.
Pictures of my late father and relatives on our walls have a similar effect
along with artifacts such as letters from these relatives. In fact, our pet
beagle Sparky had the same effect on our entire family when he was living with
his loyal and happy demeanor. Everyone was validated with an endorphin rush
(satisfying sensation) when they pet or held him in their arms.
Why are these emotions evoked
(and spontaneously)? Are they relevant to the classroom?
Priming
It is called priming. In other words,
observing pictures of people (or even pets) that we put trust and found love
creates a positive mental state out of a no-mood or even depressed state. Those
images tickle my emotional memory bank and uplift my spirit spontaneously,
prompting me to take a fresh perspective on life, motivating me to get things
done.
I believe this is what
is referred to as the oxytocin effect. Oxytocin, a
hormone, is released in association with maternal behavior such as childbirth
and breast-feeding but also in both genders in the areas of commitment,
romantic attachment, and calm feelings. Humans have the most receptors for
oxytocin of all animal species. Those family and pet images trigger the
secretion of this hormone, creating a feel-good sensation while minimizing the
amygdala's fear-sensitive
impulse that lessens a person's capacity to be social and productive. Oxytocin
underlies trust and is an antidote to depressive feelings.1
If it works at home,
will priming do similarly in the classroom, that is,
generate a mood conducive to learning or any setting for that matter? Can it
counteract the cultural negatives children face through domestic ills and the
media? It can and there have been scientific studies that verify that priming alters perceptions associated with tolerance and mood.
Subliminal priming results in positive
responses
One study was led by
professors of psychology Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver. Participants viewed the resumes (gender, age, marital
status, and national origin) of students sitting across from them. As you can imagine knowing a person's
national origin can prejudice your thoughts about another individual. They then
read either a neutral list of words: (office, table, boat, and picture) or
emotionally secure words: (closeness, love, hug, and support).2
The participants were
then to evaluate, using a checklist, the two students sitting near them on
positive characteristics (honest, cheerful, reliable, warm, patient) and
negative characteristics (argumentative, sleazy, spineless, impulsive, lazy).
The result? When the
participants read the neutral words, they evaluated people of similar national
origin favorably but rated the students of different national origin
unfavorably.
On the other hand, when
the participants read emotionally secure words, they evaluated people of
similar and divergent national origin favorably.
That simple. Reading a
list of words internalized feelings about another human being.
In fact, Mikulincer used participants of
diverse emotional attachment personalities (as determined through an extensive
questionnaire): secure, avoidant, and anxious and got comparable results.
Avoidant and anxious individuals are particularly prone to demonstrate less
tolerance toward others of
diverse race and political background. However, the experiment showed that even
those with avoidant or anxious rearing could be primed to have secure feelings.
Conscious security primes
To test the priming method further, they had one hundred twenty
student volunteers rate their willingness to interact with what they would
consider socially incompatible people. Instead of the subliminal word list the
volunteers were asked to simply visualize themselves "in a problematic
situation that you cannot solve on your own, and to imagine that you are
surrounded by people who are sensitive and responsive to your distress, who
want to help you because they love you, and set aside other activities to
assist you."2 It was not a subliminal but rather a conscious
security prime.
The neutral prime was to imagine
yourself going to a grocery store and think about shoppers buying groceries,
talking among themselves, examining new brands, and comparing different
products. Like the bias finding
in the previous study, the participants instead decided whether they would be
"willing to invite a socially incompatible individual to their home and
join them when they went out with friends".
The result? The
participant opted to either invite the socially incompatible individual to
their home or go out with friends if they had been primed with the emotional
comforting thoughts first. Those
participants that were primed consciously with the neutral grocery shopping
prime hesitated in their desire to include a socially incompatible person to
their home or go out with friends.
Shaver concluded that even
though a person could have
…attenuated
derogatory reactions to out-group members or to targets that threatened the
participants' worldview… having a sense of being loved and surrounded by
supporting others seems to allow people to open themselves to alternative
worldviews and be more accepting of people do not belong to their own group.3
Even with avoidant and
anxious personalities, there is a temporary activation of attachment security
to become outwardly accepting and tolerant. It gets interesting with what
Mikulincer and Shaver did next.
Priming and altruism
In another procedure
that probed the effects of priming to a greater degree, individuals had the
option to substitute for another person that was performing peculiar actions
such as petting a laboratory rat, putting their arm in ice water, touching a
tarantula or a preserved sheep's eye or a snake, or let cockroaches crawl up
their arm. Avoidant and anxious personalities were reluctant and declined to
step in to perform the remaining actions. However, those individuals that were
primed to think about "…. someone who wants to help you because they love
you…." expressed compassion and even a willingness to step in and complete
the awkward tasks even for the most avoidant and anxious personalities.4
The thought-prime was
so profound that it triggered altruistic compassion within
the conscious mind. It made every
participant feel more secure, willing to do something to alleviate another's
suffering. What happened here?
It
is an affirmation known as personal validation. By priming the brain with emotionally secure words or
loving memories, people with a wide range of personalities spontaneously feel
secure and experience moments of tolerance and empathy.
It is the oxytocin effect mentioned
earlier. Apparently the subliminal and conscious primes worked in the
prefrontal cortex-amygdala network in
individuals and revived the feel-good memories. The prefrontal cortex memory bank
experienced a rekindling of compassion from experiences in an earlier part of
life and quieted the fear-sensitive amygdala to allow the person
to negate prejudice and even create a state of altruism to alleviate another
from discomfort, perhaps like me when I carried the bag for the elderly person
after we got off the bus.
The media prime
Primes can work to
promote negative states of mind. As parents and educators, we should be
concerned with the 'primes' our children experience every day. Where do they
come from? At home and school of course but a sizable amount from the media,
some benign, emphasizing kindness, like Sesame Street, but many channels are
saturated with adult themes, with adult actors perpetrating acts that are cruel
– not the kind of validation we want our children
to experience. The Food Channel and Home
and Gardens Network provide interesting programming but there is so much more
that is X-rated on cable networks and accessible to everyone.Here's a small sample of the incidents captured between Jan. 11 and Feb. 11, 2013, on television, several prime-time shows:
-A character on ABC's Body of Proof says he dreams of ripping a woman's brain out while she's still alive, but he's shot as he's about to stick a hook up her nose. Then he's pushed off a balcony and killed.
-A prison riot episode of CBS' Hawaii Five-O includes one man trying to kill someone in a laundry room press, a man snapping someone's neck with his legs and a man injected with something that causes a violent convulsion.
-A gun fight on ABC's Last Resort is ignited by one man stabbing another in the abdomen with a screwdriver.
-A man on CBS' Criminal Minds is shot dead by the FBI as he tries to cut the eyelids off a gallery owner's face.
-Two characters on Fox's Bones wake to find a corpse hanging from the canopy above their bed, dripping blood onto them.
-An already bloody man is dragged into a warehouse on CBS' The Mentalist, choked to death and thrown in a furnace - all witnessed by a little boy hiding in the building.
-A man writhes in pain on Fox's Fringe before a parasite violently bursts out of his body. He's surrounded by the bodies of others who had met the same fate.
-A scene in ABC's Grey's Anatomy features a woman's nightmare about sawing her leg, as blood spurts and she screams in pain.
-A gymnastics coach is stabbed several times in the groin on NBC's Law & Order: SVU.
-A man working on a coffee cart on The Following is doused with gasoline and burned alive.5
…while
children have an instinctive desire to imitate, they do not possess an instinct
for determining whether a behavior ought to be imitated. They will imitate
anything, including behavior that most adults regard as destructive and
antisocial. The evidence indicates that if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there
would be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer
rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults. Violent crime would be half what
it is.6
Also, in a report from
The American Psychological Association Commission on
Violence and Youth:
…. violence is not a random, uncontrollable, or inevitable
occurrence. There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence
on television are correlated with increased acceptance of
aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior.7
Furthermore, consider
the wave of sexualization that has bombarded
our culture significantly invalidating girls, emphasizing physical appearance
over mental accomplishments and academic goals. Obsessions with body image
intrude on the social and academic life of students. The American Psychological
Association (APA) Task Force on
the Sexualization of Girls reports that
What
young women believe about themselves and how they feel in the present moment
about themselves were shaped by how they were treated and what they were
exposed to when they were girls. Cognitively, self-objectification has been
repeatedly shown to detract from the ability to concentrate and focus one's
attention, thus leading to impaired performance on mental activities.8
Counteract the
morbid projections of the entertainment industry
It means that children
are going to be affected by the barrage of sexualization and violence flashing across
television sets and movie
screens.
The
consequence of these media presentations primes their minds, and the more
viewing, the greater the priming. As stated previously, children, particularly
teens, are validation-starved, and these shows are the predominant source.
Therefore, a child's mood and behavior can be media inspired, and those that
engage in lewd and violent behavior likely saw it role-modeled on television,
computer, and movie screens!
The multibillion-dollar
media and advertising industry have inculcated representations of humans as
sexualized, angry, vindictive, manipulative, shallow, disrespectful,
and violent. Screenwriters are outdoing each other, since the bar is raised
every year to escalate the sexualization and violence and grab your
attention both in theaters and television. Does it seem reasonable to assume that students come into
schools with a sufficient dose of negativity and confusion deep in their
psyches when actors role-model decadent behaviors daily?
I believe students
respect their teachers, but our demeanor and charisma pales in comparison to
pop stars and the captivating, well-scripted people on television. Only by acknowledging children as valued people does a
school offset media priming leveled at them
every day. Even if many students do not view the adult-themed programs, there
still is an entertainment industry that looms, hoping to win them over
permanently, analogous to MacDonald's Happy Meals. In that vein, the PG-13 and
G-rating system fail to identify what lurks once the show begins and the
American airwaves are saturated with them. Compassionate teachers that create
explicit behavioral and academic goals are performing a great service to
counteract the ever pervasive and morbid projections of the entertainment and
marketing industry on children. Here is the quandary: the child is
neurologically thirsty for validation and it is quenched in various forms:
statements affirming talents and strengths from parents, teachers, and peers OR
the onslaught of well-crafted screenwriting based on greed, violence, and sex.
The later sells, is readily accessible, and will flood the television market
forever. They role-model human behavior for millions of viewers who regard the
shows as novel, and for many, addicting. That is why positive validation is so
important in the life of a child. It helps children gain
a sense of themselves, resist peer pressure, tactics of bullies, and helps
American girls to not be victimized by the culturally incessant need to focus
on appearance. Furthermore, children that are validated develop an internal
locus of control, that is, a belief that success hinges ultimately from within,
and take responsibility for the outcomes of their actions. They are
independent, empowered to carry out the many household, academic, and personal
responsibilities in their daily lives with minimal supervision.9
Examples
of validation primes:
· Asked
to Prom by a person you admire;
· You
receive a very high score on a quiz or exam;
· Your
team wins a match or game and you made significant contributions;
· A
student or teacher says hello to you in the hallway;
· You
get accepted to your first-choice college;
· You
sit with peers at lunch and take part in the conversation;
· A
teacher publicly commends you on your work in class or even some
extracurricular accomplishment.
Examples
of when a student is invalidated:
· A
friend passes in the hallway without acknowledgement;
· You
receive a low score on a quiz or exam;
· You
do not make the squad for a sport;
· You
get wait-listed or denied from a first-choice college;
· You
don't get asked to Prom;
· You
sit alone at lunch fearing that moving next to a group may result in a rebuff;
· A
teacher makes a critical comment in front of your peers or uses sarcasm.
Of course, these
scenarios are encountered in various degrees. For instance, the friend that
does not acknowledge in the hallway may have been looking in a different
direction. Mediocre grades may justify a rejection to a 'long-shot' college. In
other words, what may be validating to one person may be less significant to
another. Teens are self-objectifying and feel invalidated for any number of
reasons. Though grades are important, a student's status (imagined or real) in
the school community is often based on appearance because our culture places
enormous emphasis on body image and dress. In addition, family income and
social stature play a role.
As
educators we must be particularly careful with our language because it can
invalidate a student's academic or social image. Public humiliation is a prime
that can be devastating and do irrevocable harm. Too, some students feel
awkward when praise is heaped on them for any reason (class performance or
other talents). Children through adolescence have not experienced full
maturation of the executive functions and lack the sophistication to be humored
by sarcasm, deprecating statements, or any evaluation of the persona (a la Don
Rickles). You will have a few comparatively mature students, but always conduct
conversations in a safe mode. In addition, notes on papers or tests can be a
particularly effective way to validate an effort or give constructive
criticism. The type of banter you maintain with family or colleagues should be
of different caliber than with pupils.
The work of Mario
Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver is proof that
educators have the capacity to motivate students to enjoy learning and
encourage their peers in the process. In that regard, I believe schools should
try to create positive primes throughout the building and in classrooms. In a
world flooded with greed and cruelty represented continuously by the media
along with social and academic pressures in school, it is imperative that acts
of kindness be modeled for children.
Students enter
our classes with mindsets
Carol Dweck argues that students
come into our classrooms with fixed- and growth-mindsets. She has done
extensive research in this area and notes that children that are slanted toward
the fixed category have a mindset that they cannot further their character,
talent, and intellectual development. It is attitudinal, therefore, and does
not take in consideration that countless numbers have been inspired to better
themselves in those qualities with a growth-mindset. Fixed-mindset students are
less motivated in class to perform academic tasks both in school and homework.
They are strongly shaped nevertheless by media and online stimuli that mold
their cognition and drive, likely not in the academic or interpersonal realms.
Dweck teamed up with
Angela Duckworth to assess the growth-mindset
of high school students and found that those that rated high on the survey were
grittier (more interested and focused). They achieved higher grade point
averages and were more likely to enroll and finish college.
Growth-mindset people
of any demographic or I.Q. have a belief system that they can improve their
abilities through dedication and effort. They maintain a love of learning and
resiliency until they accomplish their goal(s). Many leading artists, authors,
entrepreneurs, athletes, and all individuals of accomplishment probably have a growth-mindset.10
In addition, nurturing
of children has a dramatic effect on their personality development. In a 1991
study, Laurence Steinberg, Professor of Psychology at Temple University, and his team,
used a questionnaire to evaluate ten thousand teenagers' opinions about their
parents' behavior. The parenting style that was "warm, respectful, and
demanding" correlated with higher grades, more self-reliance, less anxiety,
and reduced
delinquent behavior. It not only crossed gender, ethnic, social class, and
parent marital status demographics but was a pattern found in subsequent
research studies across the globe in the decade following Steinberg's original
paper.11
How can we generate an
atmosphere to help young minds to tilt in favor of growth-mindset?
1
|
Have an opening day assembly where the principal or others provide the value clarification desired by your school community. The discussion should be explicit about the
a) significance of content areas and literacy in the life of students;
b) concern the school has for their well-being;
c) need to treat everyone with kindness;
d) specific actions the school takes for inappropriate conduct.
|
2
|  Tell each student face-to face how much they are valued as a person and their talents. A student should be acknowledged a few times a semester in this personal manner. Many teachers have altered the lives of children by voicing uplifting and reassuring comments. |
3
|
Have at least one value quote that is central to the school's mission on the building's exterior. Post pictures of famous role models throughout the building with quotes and captions describing their success in life, especially the person the school is named.
|
4
|  Have assemblies that honor students for their accomplishments and allow student musicians and vocalists to perform. Have a teacher or principal express gratitude for the performance in front of the audience. |
5
|
The school community particularly appreciates evening concerts and musicals because it sends a strong message to the parents that their children are talented in varied ways. Parents generally gauge their children by report cards but having night programs broadens their definition of success and sends a signal that the school harbors a diversity of talent.
|
6
|
Schedule back-to-school nights and coffees for the parents and inform them about school values that are expressed to the students. State, too, how the faculty and administration value each student. Talk about accomplishments of the faculty. Let them see trophies won by students. Try to keep the program moving to minimize personal parent agendas. Have students perform instrumental pieces.
|
7
|
Promote community service opportunities.
|
8
|
Schedule an honorary assembly for the custodians and kitchen staff.
|
9
|
Mail commendation letters home when students do something above and beyond.
|
10
|
Demonstrate compassion and acts of altruism in the adult community of the school.
|
11
|
Encourage students to not only be involved in extracurricular activities but attend those of their classmates.
|
12
|
Devise homework that is reinforcing, stimulating, creative, and relevant. Priming in the positive sense is lessened by those instructors that dispense assignments that are either too hard, too repetitive, or too long. Allowing students time to begin an assignment in class is beneficial.
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References
1. Lee, H.,
Macbeth, A., Pagani, J., Young, W. (2009). Oxytocin: the great facilitator of
life. Prog. Neurobiol. 88 (2): 127–51.
2. Mikulincer, M.,
Shaver, P., (2001). Attachment Theory and Reactions to Others' Needs: Evidence
That Activation of the Sense of Attachment Security Promotes Empathic
Responses, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81. No. 6. 1205-1224
3. Mikulincer, M.,
Shaver, P., (2001). Attachment Theory and Intergroup Bias: Evidence That
Priming the Secure Base Schema Attenuates Negative Reactions to Out-Groups, Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81, No. 1, 97-115
4. Mario
Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P., Gillath, O., and Nitzberg, R., (2005). Attachment,
Caregiving, and Altruism: Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and
Helping, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 89, No. 5, 817–839
5. David, B.,
(2013). Litany of Horrors, Seattle Times.
6. Centerwall, B.,
(1993). Television and Violent Crime, The Public Interest.
7. The American
Psychological Association Commission on Violence and Youth, 1993
8. The American
Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, 2007
Retrieved from
http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report.aspx
9. Hall, K., Cook,
M., (2011), The Power of Validation: Arming Your Child Against Bullying, Peer
Pressure, Addiction, Self-Harm, and Out-of-Control Emotions, New Harbinger
Publications
10. Dweck, C.,
(2007). Mindset: The New Psychology of
Success, Ballantine Books
11. Steinberg, L.,
Mounts, N. S., Lamborn, S. D., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1991). Authoritative
parenting and adolescent adjustment across varied ecological niches. Journal of
Research on Adolescence, 1(1), 19-36.
