Recap: Harness the Science of Emotion in the Age of AI with Flower Darby

Affective neuroscience is a powerful tool for understanding how to create more engaging and joyful learning environments for students, as Flower Darby shared in her workshop last week, “Harness the Science of Emotion in the Age of AI: Boosting Engagement and Learning In Person and Online.” Darby, who serves as associate director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri, visited UM’s campus on February 25 to share insights with instructors who want to understand the ways emotion influences learning.

Darby’s research draws from Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of well-being, first introduced in his book, Flourish. PERMA represents five qualities that lead to what Seligman argues is a good life, all backed by research into health and longevity. Those five qualities are: 

• Positive emotions, 
• Engagement, or the sense of being fully immersed in work, similar to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as a flow state,
• Relationships, whether they are romantic or platonic, 
• Meaning, and
• Accomplishment. 

To ignore the role of emotions in learning is to pretend that we are brains on sticks in learning environments, which simply is not the case. Emotions have a profound impact on teaching and learning. For example, the way we feel at a given moment affects our motivation to engage in deep or difficult work. 

Further, we know that emotions drive our thinking. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang argues that you can only think deeply about things you care about, which suggests that engaging students’ interests and motivation is a prerequisite to the critical thinking we hope they will do.

What’s more, emotions are contagious; when someone is experiencing joy or curiosity, it tends to affect the emotional “climate” of the room, in Darby’s words. As teachers, we can work to create a warm atmosphere in our classes by encouraging fun. One way Darby suggested doing so was to show a collage of several photos (she gave participants six) and asking them to choose one that represents their current mood or feeling. Another is to ask students to share one photo from their phones that makes them feel happy. In an in-person class, this could be done by turning to a neighbor; in an online class, students could post a picture in a discussion board.

Other ways to engage positive emotions and build engaged classroom environments include:

• Prioritize our well-being. If we aren’t doing a good job of regulating our own emotions, students will find it harder to do so as well. 
• Bring our passion—because it’s contagious! As Darby said, “You can be the sun in your class and bring the warmth and light.” By allowing students to see why we love our disciplines and topics, we spark curiosity and engagement among them.
• Evoke emotional responses with the materials and activities we choose to share. Consider designing more human or playful slides when you’re lecturing, or create assignment prompts that give students the agency to make it relevant to something they care about.
• Reduce sources of anxiety. Students who feel anxious about their ability to do the work or fit into our class environments will have a lower level of cognitive engagement because their brains are distracted by the low level of fight-or-flight hormones in their systems.
• Cut some content. Darby noted that we’re all loathe to further trim our classes, particularly in sequenced courses that build on one another. She shared a study by Bryan Dewsbury and others that experimented with cutting a third of course content in an introductory-level science class to make time for students to connect socially. In the next sequence of the course, students who were in that socially connected course retained more information and experienced deeper learning.
• Get to know your students as people—and help them get to know you outside of your discipline. When students know we care about them (what Darby called pedagogical caring), and when they find some personal, motivational toehold into the content of our course, they are able to enjoy the course and deepen their learning.

Flower Darby’s forthcoming book, The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes, will be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in April 2026.