Echoing my personal experience as outlined at the opening of this Dissertation, Immordino-Yang and Damasio assert that emotions are cognitive and that emotions play a strong role in enabling children to apply knowledge acquired in school to real-life contexts, going as far as to state:
... it may be via an emotional route that the social influences of culture come to shape learning, thought, and behaviour (2007: 5).
The two following comments from the children in the study also endorse this point regarding emotions and cognition. I don’t know. It’s just the expressions he put on the faces put the expressions inside me and what I keep inside and let out when I need it, (Child Five, final interview), and I like this painting because… you can tell the lady’s expression in it. She seems quite happy(Child Five, week 2 interview).
The participants’ responses would seem to suggest a need for their reading of the subjects’ emotions to somehow link back to their own emotional responses. Contemplating a variety of definitions of emotions by leading theorists such as Lazarus (1991) and Frijda and Mesquita (1994), Oatley, Kelter and Jenkins (2006) support this idea, defining emotions as: ‘multi-component responses to challenges or opportunities that are important to the individual's goals, particularly social ones’ (2006: 29). Oatley et al, (2006: 28-29) highlight the idea that emotions are about the personal, our social selves and a need to pursue individual aims. In a similar vein, Bower (1992: 13) recognises the need for some kind of emotional self-
realisation to be accessible if engagement is to be encouraged. Bower suggests that an aspect of an event will capture our interest if it stimulates us in some way. Bower claims that the more emotionally relatable the aspect the more intense our concentration and subsequently the more likely it is that our learning of that aspect will increase. Bower (1992) cites a study by Christianson and Loftus (1987) in which participants demonstrated a better ability to recall the prime theme of a series of images when the images were of an emotional nature rather than a set of ‘neutral’ images (Bower, 1992: 19). Bower also draws on the work of various researchers who studied the connection between mood congruity and cognition. Citing studies by Snyder (1988, 1990) and his own (Forgas and Bower, 1987) earlier work, Bower illuminates the tendency for those experiencing a positive mood state to exude a mirror response and those in a negative or serious mindset to also exude responses appropriate to their moods (1992: 22). Additionally, he considers that an
individual's mood when asked to recall a memory, influences the type of memory that he/she will recall. That is to say a happy mood will stimulate a happy memory. Bower claims that:
thoughts, plans and memories' can be awakened retrospectively and as such, that an individual's predispositions in terms of his/her thinking, judgments and learning are inextricably interwoven with mood and memory (Bower, 1992: 28).
Emotion and mood it would seem influence an individual's preferences and fears. This is significant when examining young peoples' preferences and interests in terms of learning and specifically, when considering their engagement with artworks in a gallery. It may well be that memory and emotions impact choice when young people are asked to select exhibits for discussion in a gallery setting, and it might also influence their verbal and practical responses to the exhibits. Perhaps young people are predisposed to select certain exhibits precisely because they arouse certain memories of a designated emotional nature and the individual concerned feels compelled to revisit that experience and emotion, whether it be positive or otherwise. The emotional state they are in that day, when selecting could also come into play. Certainly, the data from this study supports these possibilities. For example, ‘Because that’s what I like. I like dark stuff. That’s the kind of games I play – dark games, scary games so that kinda puts me in the mood for that’, (mid point interview, lines 73-74). Ben-Ze’ev (2000: 13-15) informs us that we
experience emotions when positive or negative changes take place and when these changes have personal associations for us: ‘An emotional change is always related
to a certain personal frame or reference against which its significance is evaluated’ (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000: 15).
The perceived significance of the change to the individual concerned determines the intensity of the felt emotion (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000: 16) and might be referred to as a ‘personal baseline’ (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000:19). Mandler (1992) suggests that, when we have previously experienced an object or event, a ‘presentation’ of a copy of the object or event will stimulate its ‘representation’. It is this process that incites a sense of ‘familiarity’. Ben-Ze’ev and Mandler offer theories that relate well to the museum experience. The suggestion that an individual object might stimulate past experience or memory when engaging with an art object requires due consideration if objects are to have meaning and encourage engagement during school visits. I note that this position echoes Preziosi’s point (2003: 3) made in Chapter One about ‘objects as ‘cogent evidence’ of the past’s causal relationship to the present’. In this study, the objects in question were the works of art which the children self- selected in the museum. One from the numerous examples to be found in the data in Chapter Eight that demonstrates this kind of emotional link between artworks chosen and their resonance of the past and/or of some emotion for the participant children is, ‘cos they’re 3-D and they have expressions that make people feel happy, sad, angry and that. They make you feel different things’ (Child One, final interview).
In this study I focussed on emotional expression. In any related future research I would distinguish the nuances between emotions per se, emotional states and emotional moods.