Tuesday's Tip for Language Learning #17: Affective Dissonance - Emotional Reasoning
Excerpt from Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star
If you are an emotional reasoner, you may get completely derailed on your journey to good language proficiency because you let your emotions rule your reason. Emotional reasoning, often lumped in with cognitive distortions (Beck, 1979), lets your emotional state, which can be a result of your academic experiences or a result of the events in your life or both, color your attitude, whether that is toward your course, your studying, your homework, your teacher, your textbook, your assignments, your classmates, or any other aspect of your academic life.
Definition of emotional reasoning
Emotional
reasoning feels like you are riding a roller coaster. Your performance chugs
upward, then speeds downward, over and over. Under these conditions, your
performance is tracking with these emotional peaks and valleys, ups and downs,
and not with your study.
Here
are some examples:
•
You have fallen in love, and now you and your significant other
are planning a wedding, taking massive amounts of time away from your studies;
you reason that you need to spend time on your love not your language literacy
because the love is enduring and perhaps language isn’t (wow, one could eat easily
argue the opposite);
•
You owe a lot of debts and now one of them is after you to pay up
or else; while scrambling to pay your debt, you may actually take on another
job (not a good idea when your studies are already an important job), and you
are tired in class; and/or
•
You have fallen sick enough that your doctor wants you to rest up
for a few days, but you do not want to miss class; you are experiencing
anxiety.
emotional reasoning =
making decision based on feelings, not thinking
Eliminating emotion from reasoning
You
clearly cannot remove all emotions or opportunities for deep optional
experiences you’re your life, nor would you want to. What you need to do is not
allow emotion to take over your decision-making. There are techniques for doing
that.
Here
are some ways to eliminate the emotion from reasoning:
· Separate outside
distractive emotions from your classroom experience; make a commitment to
yourself to focus on home matters at home, social matters when you are in
society, and academic matters at school—and not mix and match;
· When you feel anxious,
take a step back, identify the source, and answer the question as to whether
the anxiety is warranted (you may not be able to do this alone though many
learners come; if it seems important and you cannot take a step back, seek
professional health, which will be worth it; and
· Recognize the tug-of-war between your thoughts and your feelings, and, if you can, give the upper hand to thoughts.
identify source = lower anxiety
Reasoning
is a cognitive function; keep it that way!
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