Conscious emotional bonding: what is it and how it is applied in education?

Let's see what conscious emotional bonding is, what it proposes and how it is used in the educational world.

Emotions greatly influence our behavior and the way we perceive our environment. Depending on the state of mind we feel when we find ourselves in a certain situation, we will act in a more or less appropriate way.

Traditionally, it has been said that we need to accept our emotions and know how to manage them when they appear, but what if we could choose them deliberately? That is to say, what if we decided to feel in the most appropriate way according to the situation we have to face?

This idea is at the core of the conscious emotional bonding approach, a very useful model in life.a model that is quite useful in life in general, but especially in the field of education. Next we are going to see what conscious emotional bonding is and how it understands the broad human emotional spectrum.

What is conscious emotional bonding?

Emotional intelligence is something that has been talked about for a long time, and it is not surprising because more and more people understand the great role that emotions play in our lives. Knowing how to manage the wide emotional spectrum, that is, being emotionally intelligent, brings us psychological wellbeing, success, and a better quality of life.brings us psychological well-being, success and allows us to face adversity without being overwhelmed by it.

One of the most common actions taken by those who talk about emotional intelligence was to concentrate efforts on helping people to identify their emotions, name them and manage them when they appear. This strategy is very necessary and useful, but it is also necessary to train the ability to make the emotions that interest us come to us. That is to say, it is convenient to acquire the appropriate skills to create an emotional climate that brings us advantages.

Conscious emotional bonding (CEB) is a strategy related to emotional intelligence that allows us to deliberately connect with our internal states.. That is, applying this strategy allows us to relate to our emotions in an intelligent way. This requires a process of self-knowledge, learning notions of self-management and emotional leadership. Its fundamental utility is above all that of influencing a group in our charge, such as a classroom or a business office.

This model was developed by clinical psychologist Roberto Aguado Romo, based on both his professional experience and numerous neuroscientific findings. Thanks to the fact that this strategy is extremely useful to attract more productive emotions according to the situation experienced, it has become one of the most used tools to achieve well-being and personal and social success for many people.

The right emotions and the wrong emotions

We generally distinguish between positive or "good" emotions, which are those that make us feel good; and negative or "bad" emotions, which are those that are unpleasant to feel. This vision is very different from how the VEC model conceives emotions, in which a different classification is made. Here emotions are categorized as appropriate emotions and inappropriate emotions.

Appropriate emotions can be defined as those that are appropriate and functional for coping in a given context.. For example, feeling fear when there is a threat nearby (e.g., a fire or a robbery) is adaptive, as this emotion motivates us to move away from the danger or to ask for help.

In contrast, inappropriate emotions are those that do not serve us to cope with a given situation functionally, and can even harm us in the form of limitations and new problems. For example, the same fear as in the previous case, if it appears in a situation that is harmless (e.g., giving a lecture or taking an exam) is a dysfunctional emotion, since it does not allow us to carry out a certain task or necessary action.

The VEC model holds that people, at least most of us, are born with a repertoire of basic emotions that we are hardwired to feel by natureWe are born with a repertoire of basic emotions: disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and joy. As we grow up and interact within our culture, we learn to associate these emotions with specific situations. If this learning is not appropriate, such as associating fear to social contexts, we will end up suffering unpleasant consequences.

The main premise of conscious emotional bonding is to to get the people with whom it is applied to unlearn the dysfunctional relationships between emotions and certain situations in order to be able to re-establish new ones. so that they can re-establish new associations, this time in a functional way. The idea is that the individual feels sadness when this emotion is appropriate, fear when it is necessary to flee from danger or joy when the occasion is appropriate. In order to learn when it is necessary to feel one emotion or another, as it happens in childhood, it is good to have the appropriate reference.

Application of the VEC model in the educational environment

Conscious emotional bonding is especially useful in educational contexts, obtaining very good results for both teachers and students. Thus, the VEC model applied in the educational environment aims to create an emotional climate that facilitates learning.. For this purpose, two types of emotions are distinguished, which facilitate or hinder teaching and learning.

TRAM Emotions

The TRAM emotions are:

• Sadness: if the teacher or student feels sad, unmotivated or distressed.
• Anger: anger towards the obligation of having to be in class and do homework.
• Disgust: when the subject taught is boring, unpleasant and unattractive.
• Fear: the student feels incapable of learning or is afraid of not being up to the task.

The TRAM emotions are those that do not want to manifest themselves much in an educational context.. Whether the teacher or the students experience sadness, anger, disgust or fear in class, it will be very difficult to learn in a meaningful way, much less for knowledge to be integrated.

This is especially visible in the case of students with good aptitudes, as is the case of children with high abilities. These are children who have a natural facility for acquiring certain knowledge but who, if they are not sufficiently motivated, find the subject boring, uninteresting and prefer to focus their attention on things that do give them pleasure.

The teacher or the parents themselves, unaware of the importance of motivation in the educational process, end up saying that "the child can, but does not want to" attributing a certain rebelliousness or negativism. But the fact is that the child really does want to, what happens is that he/she can't because during the course of the classes, emotions arise that do not facilitate the learning process in the least..

CASA Emotions

CASA emotions are curiosity, admiration, security and joy, and are precisely the emotional states that we want to occur in educational contexts.. These emotions motivate both the teacher and the students, facilitating the teaching and learning process. Students feel capable of learning, experiencing real interest in the subject and the way it is taught. Meaningful learning occurs and knowledge is acquired in a simple and natural way.

The importance of ECV

All human emotions have an adaptive purpose, otherwise we would not have preserved them after thousands of years of evolution. We should not see emotional states as positive or negative based on how they make us feel, but conceptualize them as adaptive or maladaptive depending on whether they make us adapt and overcome the situation or context in which we find ourselves. Anger is useful when we have to defend ourselves, fear is necessary when there is danger and joy is adaptive when we are with other people and we want them to have a good impression of us.

For all these reasons, the SCV is a very good tool for learning in an educational context, but also functional for life in general.. By consciously engaging with our emotions we can make the most of them.