We propose to investigate the relationship between learning and the physiological effects of emotions. Learning almost always results during emotional experience (Capatides, 1989; Stein & Levine, 1989; Stein & Hernandez, 2007). Furthermore, there is a long history of research showing that emotions often have major effects on cognitive activity (Basowitz et al., 1955; Child & Waterhouse, 1953; Lazarus, 1966; Lazarus et al., 1952; Sarason, 1972; Sarason, Mandler, & Craighill, 1952). In addition, a large and persuasive body of research indicates that physiological signals related to skin and cardiac activity are the signs of specific internal states connected to cognition and emotion (Ekman et al., 1983; Lang et al., 1993; Lang, 1995; Healey and Picard, 2005; Greco et al., 2012; Valenza et al., 2014). We will expose participants to an emotion eliciting stimulus, during the learning processes, while simultaneously measure their physiological reactions using biosignal platforms. We will try to find correlations between learning task results and these physiological measures of emotional state.


The study case will be in the context of TELMI project. The main aim of the TELMI project is to study how we learn musical instruments, taking the violin as a case study, from a pedagogical and scientific perspective. TELMI project touches on all learning domains, especially psychomotor domain, the cognitive domain and the affective domain in which physiological effects of emotions can be investigated. Understanding the learning cases where self-expression is limited, and emotional states are less able to be regulated, psycho-physiological measurements will play an important role for tracking emotional state and quality of learning. Understanding how we learn music from a psycho-physiological perspective and creating new assistive, multimodal, interactive, and social-aware systems to complement traditional teaching can give us insight into the origins of knowledge and the fundamental principles of learning.