Empower high school students to create schools and communities where emotions matter! Spread the word; take the survey.
We at NPR Inc. have a long and proud history with two of the figures who are most closely identified with the theory of emotional intelligence: Peter Salovey and Marc Brackett. It was Salovey, along with John Mayer, who, in 1990, first defined emotional intelligence as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions” (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). Salovey hosts the video Optimizing Intelligences: Thinking, Emotion & Creativity, produced by NPR, Inc. The video also features John D. Mayer speaking on Emotional Intelligence.
Marc Brackett, who earned his PhD from the University of New Hampshire under John D. Mayer and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale with Peter Salovey (who has since been appointed President of Yale University), became closely associated with the theory of emotional intelligences and its applications, co-authoring hundreds of scholarly publications on the topic and co-editing the book Emotional Intelligence: Key Readings on the Mayer and Salovey Model, published by NPR, Inc. Marc also developed the RULER Approach to Social Emotional Learning. In 2013, Brackett was named Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, which recently teamed up with Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation to launch an initiative called the Emotion Revolution.
The initiative is designed to build awareness of the role emotions play in young people’s learning, decision-making and overall wellness of youth. It begins with an online survey of high-school age youth (available at EmotionRevolution.org) that includes questions about things like how students feel they are treated by classmates, how they view their relationships with adults at the school and how they view the work they do there. In a video in which she speaks about the Emotion Revolution, Lady Gaga describes feeling isolated, depressed and different as a teen, and how she was motivated to this project by the belief that, ”working together, we can make the world a kinder and braver place where all voices are heard, all feelings are respected.”
“Our goal is to create a call to action to America’s schools, to take seriously the social and emotional development of youth,” says Brackett, a member of the Born This Way Foundation board since 2012. “What we know is that emotions matter, and they matter a great deal for almost everything we do in life, from learning to decision making to relationships to mental health.”
We have promised to help Marc get the word out about the Emotion Revolution. Please visit the website http://bornthisway.foundation/emotionrevolution to learn more. Most importantly, please share this information with high school staff or directly with high school students and encourage students to take the survey online at emorev2015.
The survey’s results will be presented at a summit this October hosted by Yale University. Gaga and her mother, Born This Way Foundation co-founder Cynthia Germanotta, are slated to appear at the event, as are our friends Peter Salovey and Marc Brackett.
