La neurociencia como fundamento de la educación emocional

To educate is, according to the dictionary, "to develop or to improve intellectual and moral faculties of the child or young person through precepts, exercises, examples, etc.". It comes from the Latin word educare, literally "e" (for "ex"), that is, outside, and "ducare", to drive or to guide. Educating is, therefore, "driving or guiding from the outside." However, one of the highest aspirations of education must be to help children, teenagers and young people to develop capacities allowing them to drive themselves, so they become not only the protagonists but also the directors of their own lives. The cognitive ability related to the capacity to be the directors of our own life is part of the so-called executive functions, one of whose most important aspects is emotional management, which in turn is crucial to take thoughtful decisions. For this reason, emotional education becomes a key aspect of people's educational process. This statement, which has been underpinned for several decades from both pedagogy and psychology, has also more recently found equivalent support from the advances of another field of knowledge, i.e. neuroscience. This article addresses the issue of emotion generation and management in a neuroscientific context, based on the involved brain areas, as well as their linkage to a crucial concept for fostering individual and collective well-being and dignity, i.e. life success, which can be defined as the subjective state of feeling reasonably well with oneself and the environment, in a proactive and transformative way.