Uncomfortable learners may experience real pain

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In this article we explore the real pain uncomfortable learners may experience as we highlight a study connecting physical and emotional pain.

Do learners, uncomfortable and fearing rejection in a classroom, experience pain similar to the pan they would experience of they were physically injured? It sounds far-fetched, but it may be true.

A recent study, Variation in the μ-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is associated with dispositional and neural sensitivity to social rejection, freatured in the August 14 on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the United States of America journal suggests that emotional pain may be just as real as physical pain. It found that the genes that process physical pain likely process emotional pain.

The study, conducted by Baldwin M. Way, Shelley E. Taylor, and Naomi I. Eisenberger began with the following hypothesis.

“Scientific understanding of social pain — the hurt feelings resulting from social rejection, separation, or loss — has been facilitated by the hypothesis that such feelings arise, in part, from some of the same neural and neurochemical systems that generate the unpleasant feelings resulting from physical pain.”

To test the hypothesis, the study authors set up an on-line ball tossing game where two participants rejected a third. The results found that the same brain receptor gene, OPRM1, was involved in both physical and emotional pain.

This study may have ramifications for trainers, teachers, and speakers. Although not all participants feel emotional pain upon entering a classroom, it is nevertheless certain that most learners feel some negative emotion, and that some learners feel intense negative emotion when placed in a classroom situation.

It is this author’s conclusion that we trainers, teachers, and speakers have a responsibility, if we wish for effective learning to occur, to negate the effects of negative emotion.

Learning that is joyful, positive, engaging, and fun, helps build and sustain positive learning environments. Accelerated learning and Learnertainment® are helpful in this regard. Our initial classroom goal should be to, borrowing from the medical doctors' Hippocratic Code, first do no harm.