Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults.

Eight-year-olds respond better to positive feedback (‘Well done!’) than negative feedback (‘Got it wrong this time’) whereas twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

Developmental psychologist Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab discovered this difference using fMRI research. The difference can be observed particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive control. These areas are located in the cerebral cortex.

In children of eight and nine, these areas of the brain react strongly to positive feedback and barely respond at all to negative feedback. But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case. Their strategic “control centers” in the brain are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback.

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Social isolation may generate a physical feeling of coldness.

When we hear somebody described as “frosty” or “cold”, we automatically picture a person who is unfriendly and antisocial. There are numerous examples in our daily language of metaphors that make a connection between cold temperatures and emotions such as loneliness, despair and sadness. We are taught at a young age that metaphors are meant to be descriptive and are not to be taken literally. However, recent studies suggest that these metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation.

Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness.

They divided a group of volunteers into two groups. One group recalled a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded – rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to tap into their feelings of isolation and loneliness. The other group recalled an experience in which they had been accepted into a group.

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