Joy is Reciprocally Transmitted Between Teachers and Students
Both Immordino-Yang/Damasio and Pekrun et al. focus primarily on the individual student - their motivations and emotions, and how pedagogy can shape their engagement and motivation. I have always been more fascinated by the collective rather than the individualistic approach, asking how instructor and student emotions mutually affect the entire enterprise. This is a good representative article from this literature.
The present study was designed to empirically test the assumption that teachers and students systematically and mutually mimic each other's facial expressions of joy during instruction. We used a multi-camera setup to capture university instructors' and their students' facial expressions during class, submitted those video recordings to automated facial expression coding, and applied cross-recurrence quantification analysis to quantify the amount of emotional mimicry within each instructor–student dyad. We found support for the validity of the facial expression coding in that post-session self-reported joy was positively correlated with the amount of time where instructors and students facially expressed joy.