TITLE:
Attending to Feeling: It May Matter More than You Think
AUTHORS:
Carol R. Aldous
KEYWORDS:
Cognitive, Non-Cognitive, Feeling, Creativity, Problem-Solving, Decision-Making, Counseling
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.5 No.10,
June
19,
2014
ABSTRACT: Recent advances in cognitive
neuroscience reveal that reasoning and decision-making are comprised of both
cognitive (thinking) and non-cognitive (feeling, intuiting) components. Such
information is shedding new light on what it means for learners both to think
well and to solve problems creatively. Former wisdom held that feeling and
emotion interfered with one’s capacity to think: what was required for
meaningful learning was for emotion to be set aside in order for novel problems
to be solved. However, what was not espoused and what is now becoming
increasingly evident are that in the absence of feeling, novel problems are
unlikely to be solved at all. This paper documents the findings of a large
scale study of middle school students (n = 405) in which both cognitive and non-cognitive
components of thinking were measured and their relationships to successful
novel problem-solving assessed. The cognitive and non-cognitive measures
involved five aspects: a strategic, a systematic, a spatial-verbal, a
free-flowing and a feeling approach to reasoning. Contrary to the traditional
viewpoint, those learners who employed a feeling approach to reasoning were
more likely to solve a novel problem than those who did not. This holds significant
import not only for the processes of learning, teaching and successful
problem-solving, but also for the practice and process of guidance counseling.