The social brain in the classroom: insights from the SELF study on neural correlates of adolescent motivation, belonging, and learning.

Résumé

Adolescence is characterized by heightened sensitivity to social relationships, emotional experiences, and evaluative contexts, making schools a central developmental environment for motivation, learning, and brain maturation. Although educational research has long emphasized the importance of belonging, teacher-student relationships, and socio-emotional learning, and neuroscience has identified adolescence as a sensitive period for social-affective brain systems, these lines of research remain only loosely connected. As a result, socio-emotional school experiences are rarely examined in relation to their underlying neural mechanisms. This article synthesizes findings from the socio-emotional learning factors (SELF) study and introduces an integrative neuroeducational model of the social brain in the classroom. SELF represents an interdisciplinary research approach that combines educational science, psychology, and developmental and social neuroscience to investigate how adolescents' socio-emotional experiences at school-such as belonging, social exclusion, teacher-student relationships, and socio-motivational orientations-are associated with psychological processes and neural systems supporting self-referential processing, socio-emotional salience, feedback learning, and cognitive control. Building on evidence from both behavioral and neuroimaging research, including longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, the proposed model conceptualizes learning in adolescence as a socially embedded process that is psychologically mediated and reflected in neural processes during a period of heightened developmental sensitivity and plasticity. Rather than assuming linear brain-behavior relationships, the model emphasizes reciprocal interactions between classroom social ecology, motivational and affective processes, and neural mechanisms. By integrating multiple levels of analysis, the SELF neuroeducational model advances a non-reductionist perspective on educational neuroscience. It provides a framework for theory-driven research and highlights socio-emotional classroom conditions-particularly belonging and relational quality-as foundational for adolescents' motivation, learning, and socio-emotional development.