Attention is an Emotion

This is from an interview with Dr. Donald Nathanson -- go read the whole thing

Attention Deficit Disorder is treated with medications that alter emotions, even  though everybody thinks it’s treating something cognitive. It isn’t.  What it’s doing is making more interest available to the child.

This is from a site having to do with reading, teaching reading, and 
reading disorders, but the quote just caught my eye:

Attention is an Emotion:

Dr. Donald Nathanson: So often when we think about education and the  education process we take the position that education is about the way  a child receives information and processes it. That’s entirely 
cognitive. But it turns out, that to the surprise of most people, 
education is also about emotion.

I don’t just mean that you have to learn how you’re going to control 
your emotions in the classroom. I mean,  we take it for granted that we 
have to pay attention to the material that the teacher is showing us, 
pay attention like everybody else in class is paying attention, but 
what I mean is that ordinary, normal, attention itself is an emotion.

We didn’t really understand that for many years. We thought there was  normal attention, but that distraction from it involved emotions. Now 
we understand that there is a specific emotion that involves the range 
from mild interest to sheer excitement. You can see it in the face: the 
brow, the eyebrows are down, the face is sometimes tilted to the side. 
If you look at the infant you see the facial attitude we 'know as 
track, look, listen'. And when the child focuses, pays attention, 
really gets interested and involved with what’s going on, that’s what 
we think is the normal approach to learning in school.

Well, you’ve heard people talk about Attention Deficit Disorder, and 
strangely it is treated with medications that alter emotions, even 
though everybody thinks it’s treating something cognitive. It isn’t. 
What it’s doing is making more interest available to the child.

Copyright statement:  Copyright (c) 2005, Implicity, Children of the Code and Learning 1st Productions. All Rights Reserved. Permission to use, copy, and distribute these materials for not-for-profit educational purposes, without fee and without a signed licensing agreement, is hereby granted, provided that "Children of the Code - www.childrenofthecode.org" (with a functioning hyperlink when online) appear in all excerpts, copies, and distributions.