Social Emotional Learning and the Penal System

Goleman: This brings me to a wrap-up question, something that I’ve been wanting to ask you. I’m a strong advocate of what’s called social-emotional learning in schools, where there are well-designed programs that teach children emotional self-awareness, how to handle their impulses and anger, self-management, and empathy; how to understand how someone else is reacting, thinking, and feeling in a situation. And social skills – how to cooperate, how to work things out. For example, how to keep your friends when they’re trying to get you to try drugs – how to say no and still keep your friends. Very valuable, social tools like that. They’ve had very positive impacts on kids. The data now is quite overwhelming, but I was thinking about the implications of that, and the fact that this developmental period extends into the mid-twenties, for a penal system. Because right now, basically, we have schools for crime. When someone gets into trouble they’re sent to a prison and they’re living in an environment where you’ve got to be paranoid, you’ve got to be strong, you’ve got to be aggressive and violent to survive. You’re also with people who know how to make a living through criminal acts, so you pick up a lot of techniques. As a result, we’re paying more and more money and getting less and less impact in our prisons. Basically there’s a revolving door. A lifetime criminal will commit about fifteen crimes that they’ll admit to by middle age, and that’s just the ones they’re caught at. What if instead of sending people to prison, particularly those who are in this window before twenty-five, we sent them to genuine reform schools and what was reformed was the neural circuitry. So a first offender, most first offenders are in their teens or early twenties, would go to a special school where they would have a curriculum that would help them at that point in life get the inner tools they need to make better choices, and to live a good life. What would that curriculum consist of?

Siegel: You know that’s a fabulous question. Before I address the question of what the curriculum would be, let me point out a number of things that support exactly what you’re saying. Social-emotional learning can be thought of, in terms of brain correlates, as development of the prefrontal cortex – that’s really what you’re talking about. Any program in schools that allows kids to learn these techniques, and any reform program that would supply them, can be seen as helping the prefrontal cortex grow. In my own recent work on the mindful brain, I look at the relationship between a parent and child that looks like it helps the prefrontal cortex grow well. The ability to actually be aware of your own internal workings, to be open and receive what they are, to actually be aware of impulses and to say, no, I don’t think I’ll act on that impulse: that’s called reflective mindfulness, or reflection. Social-emotional learning in many ways is teaching these reflective skills that happen between yourself and another person, that happen between your internal states. It’s exactly what secure attachment is teaching, these reflective skills. The curriculum then would be a prefrontal cortex curriculum, and we could look toward the studies of attachment.

Here are some ideas for it. First of all, what would the outcome measures be? Well, the prefrontal cortex that I’m talking about is the one in the middle of the cortex, very much a part of the social circuitry you speak about in Social Intelligence and absolutely the part we talk about in secure attachment. It looks like the part, in a number of studies that haven’t been published yet, are really pointing to is this middle area – what would be called ventral or medial, this middle area behind your forehead. Now, those functions include keeping your body in balance when you get all revved up. Attuning to someone else is another function. It means keeping your emotions in balance. If you get all angry or hot and bothered, you can calm that down. It means something I call response flexibility, which means you consider all of you options and you choose the most appropriate one – the opposite of a knee-jerk response. A fifth thing would be having empathy for others, understanding their point of view. A sixth would be insight into your own internal workings. A seventh would actually be modulating fear. An eighth and a ninth are being in touch with your own intuition, and then morality. So, those would be the outcome measures we would look for.

I think everyone should be taught reflective skills. In addition to having a relationship with another person that promotes reflective skills, there are also skills you can teach in a group setting. Mindfulness skills, what in the research center I help run at UCLA are called mindful awareness practices, can include sitting meditation, walking meditation, it can include yoga, tai-chi, chi-gong. There are lots of things that have been around for thousands of years that can be harnessed.

Goleman: Do you believe that they would have a positive neural effect in this regulatory circuit?

Siegel: The research that’s coming out now that I summarized in The Mindful Brain suggests that these practices will help the prefrontal cortex grow. I’m confident in saying that’s where the research is pointing. We need to have a little bit more definitive studies but there are a lot of arrows, many, many arrows from independent fields that are pointing in all the same direction. That mindfulness, that form of internal reflection, actually promotes these nine functions of the middle prefrontal cortex. So, the reform program you’re suggesting should not just be for people who have committed crimes, but on a preventative basis, we should be teaching it as a part of regular school. So that it becomes the forth R if you will, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and Reflection. That the forth R becomes something that’s fundamental to what everyone is learning.

Goleman: On that note, Dan Siegel, I want to thank you so much for joining me. This has been fascinating.

Siegel: Dan Goleman, thank you very much.