Your responses have all been quite reasonable and in line with current thinking. I also believe we are probably more in agreement than it seems. I am hoping to make nuanced changes in how we understand emotional accompaniments to our predictions.

Like you, I too believe we can learn an infinite amount of information to improve or expand our knowledge base, our skill development, and our life experiences.

All learning changes our brain and body in small or big ways. For one, every time our brain experiences meaningful learning, the learning gets stored in our memory. Stored learning impacts past and future learning.

I have found our human learning is referenced in terms of how it improves our character, our emotional intelligence, our awareness, or our soul. These notions don’t reflect what is actually biologically going on inside of us but are part of our popular vernacular.

For example, if my daughter cries and screams when she gets blood taken the first three times, but whimpers softly the fourth time, it doesn’t mean she has become more in control of her emotions or more emotionally intelligent. When she was terrified of the needle the first time, it was totally appropriate for her to scream and cry. She wasn’t out of control emotionally, she was very much in control. She was not going to let people stick her with a needle without a fight. (Most often, however, such a display is characterized as being out of control emotionally.)

The fourth time, when she just whimpered, it means all the past experiences have given her stored information about what it feels like before during and after a blood draw. Her experiences taught her it’s not pleasant, but not as terrifying or painful as she predicted it would be the first few times.

I can give my daughter strategies to calm down before a blood draw. But those strategies are information she has to learn well enough to store in her memory to recall and utilize appropriately. On her fifth blood draw, she remembers to use the calming strategy I taught her. This doesn’t mean she controlled her emotions better. It means she has a different emotional response when she has a different amount of knowledge about an event. Her utilization of the calming strategy is no different than utilizing a strategy to remember there are 4 quarters in a dollar. We would never say it is emotionally intelligent to divide 100 by 4, but we do when we remember to breathe before a scary event. I don’t think we need to make artificial and arbitrary distinctions about the emotional accompaniments we have to our predictions because every time we interact with information we have an emotional accompaniment correlated to how we are able to understand the information and predict what will come next, and next, and next.

If I want to help my daughter, I load her with ways to understand and manage the event before the event, not how to make herself more emotionally intelligent before the event. Her emotions will always sync up with her predictions, and they are personal to her. I don’t tell her how to be more hungry or less hungry, more tired or less tired. I can give her strategies for packing a filling lunch or for falling asleep faster, but these are bits of information I share, not ways to be more intelligent about how she experiences hunger or fatigue.

My desire to semantically change how we reference emotions is because I observe children wanting to crawl out of their skin when we single out their emotions or behaviors for discussion. Talking about emotions and behaviors in terms of what they are and how they work is fine. But singling out a child to personally comment on his or her emotions or behaviors makes the child very anxious.

I appreciate the conversation!