Last update: 02 September, 2016
We teach children to read, write, dress or ride a bicycle. But what about their emotions? Educating children about positive emotions can become the key to their happiness. Positive emotions help people in case of difficulty. People who bend in the face of adversity, but do not break, are those who can feel positive emotions, even in very stressful situations.
Many mental health problems have an emotional origin, in fact, misunderstood or repressed emotions are bad for the body and mind. Emotions can be "educated", the difference is that they can do it alone, for better or for worse, or we are the ones who consciously influence them, helping us to understand, transform and regulate our emotions.
Educating to emotions
To educate to emotions is to educate to life. Emotional intelligence consists of having a range of skills to recognize our own emotions and those of others, as well as being able to manage them correctly.
A few years ago, emotional education taught how to suppress certain emotions and prevent them from manifesting in public. However, luckily we are beginning to discover emotional intelligence, to give it the importance it deserves and this also involves adequately expressing emotions and not repressing them.
The ideal way to reduce future levels of violence to increase those of altruism is through early social and emotional learning. If a child is able to identify his feelings about him and those of his companions, he will be able to react adequately and this will be the basis for him to improve his social skills, to know what to do at any time.
Integrating children with social problems is all about this, because children need to understand how others feel and why others understand how they feel. Knowing how to express emotions will also help children not to be voiceless, but people who know how to ask for help in case of danger or threat.
How do positive emotions help us?
Positive emotions facilitate the setting in motion of receptive, flexible and integral thought patterns, favoring the appearance of new situations and behaviors. It is very likely that this way of thinking preceded the great discoveries and most important achievements in the history of mankind.
It is difficult to imagine Michelangelo angry while painting the Sistine Chapel, Newton furious under the apple tree, Edison or Marie Curie depressed in their workshops. Conversely, it is easy to imagine them thinking about possibilities and alternatives, combining a priori impossible elements, completely immersed in their work, excited about their progress towards the desired goal that had a great meaning for them.
Likewise, diagnoses of liver disease were shown to be more accurate when doctors felt well (Fredrickson, 2003). By “more accurate” we mean that doctors took less time to integrate the relevant information and were less inclined to rely on an initial thought, therefore to make premature diagnoses.
Positive emotions help us not only feel better about ourselves, but also enhance our personal skills and competences. Feeling positive emotions day after day is a way to feel more and more in a state of global happiness.
