Cognitive Impact: Negative emotions are necessary for learning difficult concepts.

BY Giorgia Ragni

There is a concept called the Kort’s emotional learning spiral which states that learners go through a necessary pattern of emotions to learn something new.

Here it is summarized in the image below:

According to Kort, we start out in Stage 1, feeling great about the idea of learning a new concept. But when we’re confronted with confusing or challenging information, we head into Stage 2, where we start feeling confused and anxious. The new information is challenging and hard to understand!

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hen, as we start to fix up our old, outdated knowledge we’ll enter into a state of frustration. We’ll be trying out new answers to difficult questions and realizing some of the things we used to think were true are, in fact, untrue. Here, we’re not feeling very positive emotions at all! Nonetheless, it’s a necessary stage in cognitive development because to learn new things, we sometimes have to challenge our old ways of thinking.

Lastly, learners will enter Stage 4. Here, learners feel emotions like determination and hopefulness because they’re feeling like they’re finally understanding a new concept!

As you can see, learning leads to a lot of different emotions and sometimes negative emotions like confusion, annoyance and frustration are part of the experience: we need to go through these states to come out the other side having learnt something important!

Plus, when you get to the end, you feel the best emotion of all: satisfaction at having overcome challenges to be a smarter person today than you were yesterday!