It’s SPECtacular (Ep. 5) | Why Emotional Health Matters for a Growing Brain
- October 4, 2025
- 9:40 am
Why is emotional health essential to brain development, and what happens when kids aren’t taught how to recognize or manage their feelings? In this video, Linda Gorman, neuroscientist and Founder of Making Neuroscience Fun, LLC, explores the neuroscience behind emotional behaviors and how they shape our ability to cope, connect, and thrive.
Covering everything from emotional regulation and empathy to brain plasticity and hormonal changes, this talk dives into why helping kids build emotional intelligence is just as important as teaching them math or reading.
Part of the “Brain Health: It’s SPECtacular” program, this video offers educators and caregivers insight into how emotional development supports lifelong brain health — and what simple, science-backed steps can help young learners grow.
Summary
Emotional Health and the Brain: The Heart of Resilience
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Why Emotional Health Matters
- How Emotions Shape the Brain and Behavior
- Development of Emotional Regulation
- Positive vs. Negative Emotions and the Brain
- Building Strong Emotional Health
- Conclusion
- Key Takeaways
Introduction
Emotional health—the “E” in SPECTACULAR—is one of the most essential pillars of overall brain well-being. It determines how we perceive, process, and respond to life’s challenges. According to Dr. Linda Gorman, this area of neuroscience is what inspired her to create the Brain Health: It’s Spectacular program after noticing that even highly educated neuroscience students struggled to manage their emotions.
Emotional health is not about eliminating feelings; it’s about understanding, regulating, and expressing them appropriately. This ability profoundly affects how the brain adapts to change, builds relationships, and supports lifelong mental and physical health.
Why Emotional Health Matters
Our emotional health influences nearly every aspect of our lives—from how we learn and communicate to how we recover from stress. It determines:
- Coping capacity: Whether we take constructive action or avoid challenges.
- Perception: How we interpret information and stressors around us.
- Motivation: What drives us to engage or withdraw from the world.
Emotions fluctuate constantly—sometimes minute to minute—and learning to recognize and respond appropriately to them is key to maintaining brain balance.
How Emotions Shape the Brain and Behavior
Emotions are not abstract experiences—they are rooted in biology. The limbic system of the brain regulates emotional processing, influencing both behavior and cognition.
Key Insights:
- By 8–9 months of age, infants already show basic emotions such as joy, fear, and anger because the corresponding brain circuits are well developed.
- As we grow, higher-order emotional regulation emerges from complex interactions between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s “decision center.”
- These areas remain highly plastic, meaning they can continue to change and strengthen throughout life.
When emotional regulation systems function well, they help us maintain perspective, connect socially, and adapt to change. When they don’t, we become more reactive, stressed, or disengaged.
Development of Emotional Regulation
Emotional development follows a predictable—but flexible—timeline:
| Age Range | Emotional Milestones |
|---|---|
| 3–5 years | Learn social rules and appropriate emotional expression. |
| 6–8 years | Begin understanding others’ feelings (“theory of mind”). |
| 9–11 years | Recognize complex emotions, empathy, and friendship values. |
| 12–18 years | Hormonal changes heighten emotions; self-awareness and control develop through experience. |
Because these regions of the brain are still maturing, it’s important to teach children how to identify and manage their feelings early. Even in adulthood, emotional health continues to evolve through new social and life experiences.
Positive vs. Negative Emotions and the Brain
Emotions directly impact brain chemistry and neuroplasticity:
- Positive emotions—like joy, gratitude, and empathy—boost serotonin and dopamine levels, enhancing social engagement, problem-solving, and creativity.
- Negative emotions—like chronic fear, anger, or sadness—elevate stress hormones such as cortisol, which can damage brain cells and reduce neuroplasticity over time.
In short: what you feel changes your brain—and your brain, in turn, shapes how you feel.
Building Strong Emotional Health
Emotional health can be cultivated with intentional habits and awareness. Here are the strategies Dr. Gorman highlights for improving it:
- Label your emotions:
Recognize and name what you feel—sadness, anger, excitement, frustration. Labeling emotions activates the prefrontal cortex and reduces emotional overwhelm. - Show empathy:
Understanding others’ emotions strengthens social bonds and activates reward circuits in the brain. Dr. Gorman calls this “selfish altruism”—helping others also improves your own emotional well-being. - Express emotions appropriately:
Knowing when and how to express feelings is crucial for healthy communication and relationships. - Develop problem-solving skills:
Instead of reacting impulsively, practice planning and reflection. Emotional intelligence grows when we pause before responding. - Use healthy coping mechanisms:
You can’t always control what you feel, but you can control how you respond. Deep breathing, physical activity, journaling, and conversation are powerful emotional resets. - Accept emotional fluctuation:
Emotions constantly change. Learning to accept this ebb and flow prevents overreaction and fosters resilience.
Conclusion
Emotional health lies at the heart of a healthy, adaptable brain. It shapes how we think, relate, and behave across every stage of life. By learning to recognize, regulate, and express emotions constructively, we enhance neuroplasticity, reduce stress, and strengthen our social and cognitive functioning.
Dr. Gorman’s Brain Health: It’s Spectacular program reminds us that emotional intelligence isn’t just a soft skill—it’s a core brain function that can be trained, nurtured, and celebrated throughout life.
Key Takeaways
- Emotion and brain health are inseparable: Feelings influence neural growth, behavior, and learning.
- Emotional regulation develops over time: Support it through education, empathy, and safe expression.
- Positive emotions build resilience: They increase neuroplasticity and strengthen brain–body connections.
- You can’t control emotions, but you can control reactions: Healthy coping strategies transform how stress impacts the brain.
- Empathy heals both ways: Helping others benefits your own emotional circuitry and sense of purpose.
Raw Transcript
[00:00] Why do we need that? That's the E in spectacular. Why do we need our emotional health? Well, this is one of my favorites. And this is the one, the aspect of our brain health that really got me thinking about creating this program. Because I had all of these neuroscience students who were
[00:20] who I was teaching brain stuff to, I knew that they were learning a lot, but they still, they did not know how to control their emotions. They did not know how to control their emotional behaviors. So this is really what got me started. So again, emotional behaviors, your emotional
[00:40] is going to affect how you deal with changes in the environment, what kind of coping mechanisms that you do, and whether or not you do those coping mechanisms. Or you're like, I don't really care about that because you're not feeling that well. So it involves our emotions. Now we know there are positive and negative emotions.
[01:00] emotions. We know that these emotions are going to alter perceptions of information that's coming in. We know that it's going to alter our motivations. We know that your emotions change over time. But the thing about emotions is that not only do they change over time, they change constantly. Your emotions from one minute to the next.
[01:20] can be something different. So again, and a lot of you already know a lot about this because of the socio-emotional information that's out there, but basically your emotional behaviors allow you to recognize what emotion you're undergoing to regulate that emotion.
[01:40] To understand that your emotional state is going to change how you behave makes you, again because we live in this social world, we have to understand when it's okay to express our emotions and when it's okay to not express our emotions.
[02:00] then to develop skills to deal with those emotions. So all of that falls under the auspice of emotional intelligence. So basically and again if we look at the brain, the brain, the areas of the brain that control our emotions, well one of the things that I always find interesting
[02:20] interesting is that the development of emotions, by 8 or 9 months, your basic emotions are already developed. That's because the parts of the brain that are controlling those behaviors are already developed at birth and through that first year of life. But then there's a whole other part
[02:40] of the brain aspects of emotional health which are changing. These are called the limbic areas and there's lots of different parts of the limbic system and these are areas that are extremely high in neuroplasticity throughout your entire lifespan. So again, looking at the development of the emotion.
[03:00] Basically, 3 to 5, that's your pre-KK area. You're starting to develop social rules, appropriate expressions. 6 to 8, you're starting to, that's where the theory of mind, so understanding that other people have different ways of thinking and seeing the world.
[03:20] friendships are starting to be important, 9 and 11, you're starting to understand all the different social aspects of emotional behaviors and when it's okay to express those emotional behaviors and then 12 to 18, all heck breaks loose because the hormones are going to play a role and are involved.
[03:40] So the emotional behaviors, again, you'll see the development of the emotional behaviors. When someone can't control their emotional behaviors, it may be because that area of the brain is not developed yet so that they can't control their emotional behaviors.
[04:00] emotional behaviors, we know those areas of the brain are high in plasticity. We know that positive emotional behaviors tend to increase our social behaviors, cognitive behaviors, physical behaviors. We've already seen that those are very good for our brain health, and of course it's going to decrease the inflammation.
[04:20] oxidative stress. Now those are when positive emotions are there. When it's negative those areas change directions. So how can we improve our emotional health? Learn how to label your emotions. It's okay to be sad. Being sad is just part of life.
[04:40] Being sad all the time is not, so you need to be able to see am I sad because of something or am I sad because something is going on in my brain. Show empathy. This is one of the things that, part of the reason why I developed the Making Neuroscience Fund program was that when you go out and deal with other people and
[05:00] show empathy towards those other people, that makes you feel good too. I call it selfish altruism. You're doing something good for somebody else, but it's also helping your brain. Express the appropriate emotional behaviors. Develop problem-solving skills. So one of the things
[05:20] that we have to do is we have to realize, again, we're in this social environment, how do we deal with these emotions that we have? You can't control your emotions. Most of the emotions are just expressed because of your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. But you can control
[05:40] your emotional behaviors, how you respond to those behaviors. Come up with good coping mechanisms and remember, can't always control your emotions. Those happen and they change all the time. But you can control how you express those emotions, what behaviors you then produce.
[06:00] for those emotional behaviors, and that's going to help your brain. So again, emotional behaviors, very important for a healthy brain, as in social health, physical health, and cognitive health. And that brings me to my favorite part of the spec health.
