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Abstract:Developed by the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), the Early HeartSmarts (EHS) program is designed to train teachers to guide and support young children (3-6 years old) in learning emotional self-regulation and key age-appropriate socioemotional competencies, with the goal of facilitating their emotional, social and cognitive development. This work reports the results of an evaluation study conducted to assess the efficacy of the EHS program in a pilot implementation carried out during the 2006-2007 academic year in schools of the Salt Lake City School District. The study was conducted using a quasiexperimental longitudinal field research design with three measurement moments (baseline and pre-and post-intervention panels) using The Creative Curriculum Assessment (TCCA) instrument, a teacher-scored, 50-item instrument measuring student growth in four areas of developmentsocial/emotional, physical, cognitive and language development. Children in nineteen preschool classrooms were divided into intervention and control group samples (N = 66 and 309, respectively; mean age = 3.6 years), in which classes in the former were specifically selected to target children of lower socioeconomic and ethnic minority family backgrounds. Overall, there is compelling evidence of the efficacy of the EHS program in increasing total psychosocial development and also in each of the four development areas measured by the TCCA: the results of a series of ANCOVAs found a strong, consistent pattern of significant differences on the development measures favoring preschool children who received the EHS program over those in the control group who did not.Recent advances in neuroscience are highlighting connections between emotion, social functioning and decision making that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the role of affect in education. In particular, the neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of cognition that we recruit most heavily in schools, namely learning, attention, memory, decision making and social functioning, are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion … .

Scientific research has established a significant, complex, and highly sophisticated connection between the human heart and brain. The heart directly influences the activity of higher brain centers involved in perceptual and cognitive processing and in the creation of emotional experience. An important tool that provides a window into the activity occurring between the heart and brain is heart rate variability (HRV), an analytic tool that measures the beat-to-beat changes in heart rate. HRV is generated largely by interaction between the heart and brain via the neural signals flowing through the afferent (ascending) and efferent (descending) pathways of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Research has shown that sustained positive emotions facilitate an emergent global shift in psycho-physiological functioning, which is marked by a distinct change in the rhythm of heart activity. This global shift generates a state of optimal functioning, characterized by increased synchronization, harmony, and efficiency in the interactions within and among the physiological, cognitive, and emotional systems. This state is called psychophysiological coherence. As people experience sincere positive feelings, the more ordered information flowing from the heart to the brain acts to facilitate cortical function and improve cognitive performance. These findings may help explain the significant shifts in perception, increased mental clarity, and heightened intuitive awareness many individuals report when practicing heart-centered, positive emotion—refocusing and restructuring techniques.

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