Can social emotional learning and self-regulation interventions prevent violence in schools?
Humiliation.
That’s the word that was stuck in my mind the day after yet another school shooting tragically took the lives of 19 children and two teachers.
I had recently read Brené Brown’s newest book, Atlas of the Heart, in which she describes a research study of school shooters. The study revealed a common thread among the gunmen examined: They’d all experienced significant humiliation.
Brown, an emotions researcher, describes humiliation as “The intensely painful feeling that we’ve been unjustly degraded, ridiculed, or put down and that our identity has been demeaned our devalued.”
She goes on to outline other studies that have found links for peer rejection, humiliation, depression, and anger with both suicidal and homicidal ideation. These studies “suggest that bullying alone does not lead to aggression. Instead, individuals who are bullied become violent specifically when feelings of humiliation accompany the bullying.”
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As a pediatric OT with a particular interest in social emotional learning and self-regulation, I spend a lot of time studying emotional regulation, and after this latest tragedy a number of pediatric helping professionals reached out to express their sadness and ask, “What can we possibly do?”
One colleague asked “Is there anything to prove SEL works? Can you share any evidence or thoughts that social emotional learning curricula would help prevent gun violence in later years?”
This is my response:
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There are numerous studies that lead us to believe that yes, SEL has positive effects, including reducing school violence.
In 2011 Durlak et al studied SEL programs and found that students in schools that implemented SEL programs had significant improvements in social emotional skills, fewer conduct problems, and less delinquent acts. Students who had experienced these SEL programs had improvements in identifying emotions, perspective taking, and conflict resolution.
In 2014 Ttofi and colleagues reported that learning social emotional and coping skills can protect perpetrators of bullying from negative life outcomes of violent behavior and aggression
In 2018 Nickerson and colleagues reported students who were taught to understand how others think and feel, control their behavior, take responsibility for their actions, and solve conflicts said there was less bullying in their school. They also found that “students in schools that regularly employed SEL techniques had higher levels of social-emotional competencies, which thereby reduced bullying and victimization.”
A 2019 Analysis of Targeted School Violence, released by the Secret Service, concluded “It is critical that schools implement comprehensive programs designed to promote safe and positive school climates”.
Studies have shown that bullying-prevention programs have mixed results, but there is evidence that SEL programs address the problem more effectively.
It is important to note that all social emotional learning programs are not created equal. Some focus on cognitive strategies and social skills (a top-down approach), while others build skills of self-awareness and self-management (a more bottom-up approach that focuses on the foundation).
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In 2019 a colleague and I implemented a pilot study in a second-grade classroom, using an SEL program that focused on self-regulation from a body-based perspective. We were measuring social emotional learning and, at the time, I thought that empathy was something that wasn’t worth trying to measure, because we were not directly teaching it through cognitive strategies and were only implementing lessons for a short duration. I thought empathy would surely take many months to increase.
After 6 weeks of lessons that focused on the students’ awareness of their own body sensations and “Body Battery” habits, the teacher spontaneously reported a surprising increase in empathy in the classroom.
Understanding themselves helped the children to feel empathy towards others.
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The ability to feel our own feelings starts with noticing our body sensations, a sense called interoception.
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This is something that can be taught to children in a fun way: body sensing experiments. Children in our study spent 4 weeks doing things like:
stomping their feet and feeling them tingle
moving their arms like a hummingbird and feeling places in their body where their muscles get tight
noticing their heartbeat before and after doing jumping jacks
noticing their breath move in and out
feeling what happens in their body in response to a sad book vs an inspiring visualization
These activities teach kids to do a body scan that, with practice, builds interoceptive awareness, the sense of their internal body feelings.
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Empathy and compassion aren’t feelings that arise for us because someone told us that we should have them. They are feelings that develop when we can take someone else’s perspective, imagine how they might be feeling, and have a desire to make things better for them.
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These emotional skills arise from an understanding of our own feelings.
More recently, I found it fascinating to learn that the region of the brain responsible for much of the processing of these interoceptive body signals, the insula, is also recognized by neuroscientists as the part of the brain that is primarily responsible for feelings of compassion and empathy. It makes sense that these processes are neuroanatomically linked.
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We’ve now implemented these SEL lessons with many kids, and we reliably find that kids are surprised to realize that not everyone feels things the same way they do. We all process and feel things differently, and in our profession we call this “individual differences”.
Talking about individual differences helps kids to appreciate how every person is unique and gives them the ability to have empathy for someone who feels things in a different way than they do.
We also teach kids to use tools and strategies to adjust how “activated” their body feels. Having an activation that is a match for the situation can help them meet expectations. They do exercises, and experience how different tools work for different people. Some people like to run or jump, while others like to listen to music, eat something chewy, or practice breathing exercises. We all have different preferences that help us to self-regulate.
Being aware of our own feelings, noticing individual differences, and appreciating the value of each person builds compassion and empathy.
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A colleague recently shared another experience that touched me: She was teaching a lesson to middle schoolers, and they were discussing the feeling of activation in their body is present when they are dysregulated. She presented a lesson that teaches them Dan Seigel’s concept of “Flipping Your Lid”. This analogy helps to explain that when we are dysregulated the smartest part of our brain (the cortex) doesn’t work as well. He calls that “flipping your lid” because the cortex sits at the top of our brain.
This colleague reported that one student in the group shared that they had “flipped their lid” earlier that day. Another student shared that they felt afraid when it occurred.
My colleague said “We had a felt sense of safety in the class. We could dissect what happened and no one felt shamed.”
On top of that, at the end of the lesson two kids came up to give my colleague a hug.
What an amazing result from simply teaching kids to: notice their own body sensations, build awareness of their own habits, experiment with tools to help them regulate, and recognize individual differences.
Those simple activities resulted in an increase in compassion and connection.
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Another phrase that echoed in my mind the day after the Uvalde shooting was “What Happened To You?”, the title of Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey’s recent book, subtitled: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing.
Dr. Perry, a renowned psychiatrist who has specialized in trauma, and Ms. Winfrey wrote What Happened to You to highlight the effects of trauma, how it can show up as observable behaviors, and paths forward for healing. Dr. Perry proposes that what has happened in a person’s past has great influence and is a better question than “What is wrong with you?”
Interviews with the Uvalde shooter’s father, in the days following, revealed a history of many adverse childhood experiences (ACES), including his perception that his son was bullied and humiliated by peers.
A history of trauma doesn’t justify violence but understanding this does lead us towards thinking about what we can do to prevent violent tragedies from happening.
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I think about the life experiences that shaped this young man. I imagine the sense of separateness that he must have felt that allowed him to harm other humans this way.
Humiliation creates the feeling of separation.
Brené Brown said the research shows “Humiliation can trigger a series of reactions, including social pain, decreased self-awareness, increased self-defeating behavior, and decreased self-regulation, that ultimately lead to violence.”
The opposite of that separateness is common humanity, a belief that we are all connected and that we are better together.
According to self-compassion researcher, Kristin Neff, common humanity is an ingredient of self-compassion.
When we teach self-awareness, we also build capacity for self-compassion.
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When I tell people about the work we do, teaching self-regulation and social emotional learning, the comment I get most often is something like “I wish I’d had this information when I was 8 years old. My life would have been different.”
The 8-year-olds we are teaching today will be 18 in ten years. Legislation on buying guns hasn’t changed in the last 10 years since Sandy Hook. What if it hasn’t changed 10 years from now? What else can we do?
We can:
equip todays 8-year-olds with the ability to notice their own body sensations and feel their feelings
teach them to use tools to help themselves when they feel activated or unable to meet the demands of the environment
improve their ability to self-regulate
help them to express their emotions
teach them to appreciate individual differences, and develop a belief in common humanity
increase their empathy and compassion for each other
prevent humiliation, both by validating the experience of the children who are being bullied, and by increasing the compassion they receive from their peers
advocate for kids by helping other adults to adjust their expectations to match the skills available to the child
As individuals, we may not be able to bring about gun reform or fix a broken mental healthcare system. But as pediatric helping professionals there are things we can do. Teaching children awareness and regulation through a lens of compassion and connection has the potential to change the world.
References:
Brown, Brene. (2021) Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Random House.
Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymniki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact on enhancing students' social emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82, 405–432.
Nickerson, A.B. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/can-sel-reduce-school-violence?fbclid=IwAR1_hwjEIBoK9yQRRniO7KrI87HOR8ccEAkh-ULVEli8XvK2-mD8KQoQDL4
Ttofi, M. M., Bowes, L., Farrington, D. P., & Lösel, F. (2014). Protective factors interrupting the continuity from school bullying to later internalizing and externalizing problems: A systematic review of prospective longitudinal studies. Journal of School Violence, 13, 5–38
https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/Protecting_Americas_Schools.pdf