The amygdala was the central focus of today’s lecture in The Neuroscience of Learning. In short, it was discussed that this area of the brain is central in emotional learning, as it is physically connected the the hippocampus, which is responsible for the consolidation of short-term to long-term memories. Traditionally, the amygdala was active in flight-or-fight responses, and essentially tells the hippocampus to store information about dangerous things for future survival.
With regard to human emotions, there tends to be a spectrum ranging from threatened to rewarded. According to Dr. Andreatta, slightly positive emotions are the most effective for the promotion of learning. That is, if we are reacting to something overwhelmingly positive (e.g., winning the lottery) or negative (e.g., an earthquake), chances are we could not focus on our studies.
As for how this applies to instructional design, slightly positive emotions can be triggered through such things as game play, sharing interesting information with peers, attaining insight (i.e., that “aha!” feeling), application and reflection time allowance, simple quizzes, and some light competition between learning.
In my personal experience, this is certainly true as both a teacher and when I was a graduate student. I would just like to add as a caveat that learners themselves need to have some form of extrinsic or intrinsic motivation available to them in order to summon these positive feelings in the first place. As a teacher I consider this a large part of my job to provide motivation through enjoyable social activities, but it also requires learners to meet me half way.