January 2018: Student Liaison Report

Emotions such as feeling sad or happy may affect how students learn, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal Discourse Processes. 

Study findings show that watching something aimed at inducing feelings of sadness yielded better reading comprehension than watching something intended to make viewers feel happy.

Caitlin Mills is one of three authors of the study, Being Sad Is Not Always Bad: The Influence of Affect on Expository Text Comprehension, which was published in October, 2017.

“We shouldn’t take away from this, ‘Let’s induce sadness!,’” said Mills, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Mills pointed out that the sad subjects outperformed those who were feeling happy, but not those who watched a horror film and were scared.

“The main implication is what the student is experiencing is affecting how they learn,” Mills said.

Researchers randomly assigned 160 adults to watch one of two short video clips. Half saw a tear-jerker scene from the 1979 remake of “The Champ.” Half watched some of the comedy show, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?,” which supposedly makes viewers feel happy.

Afterward, everyone read the same passage about how polar bears survive in the Arctic and took a reading comprehension test.

The “sad” adults were significantly better at answering sophisticated questions, such as inferring ideas that were not explicitly written on the page than the “happy” adults. The happy and sad groups scored the same when it came to noting the facts and details of the story.

To verify the findings, researchers did the experiment a second time, with almost 600 people, and found again that the sad group outperformed the happy one when it came to analysis and inference.

Mills said a lot more research needs to be done before we know what the optimal emotions are for different learning tasks. She also speculates that sadness might be a terrible emotion when you want students to engage in discussions.