Permission to feel: addressing feeling rules as a prerequisite to emotional intelligence skill development in undergraduate prehealth education.

Initiatives to improve physiology majors' social and behavioral professional skills development would be remiss without an understanding of the emotional culture affecting intended audiences. To characterize the emotional hidden curriculum in undergraduate life science education, this study explores feeling rules that influence how undergraduate prehealth students navigate emotional expression, an important aspect of emotional intelligence, in life science classrooms. We conducted semistructured interviews and culturally responsive focus groups at an R1 university in the southeast. Our findings from interviews with 21 students revealed four feeling rules: 1) no feelings allowed: successful scientists suppress emotions; 2) please them or else: social hierarchies and acceptance take precedence over feelings; 3) just like me: relatable peers and approachable instructors foster emotional expression; and 4) there's a reason: emotional expression should comply with cultural norms and identity-based expectations. Although prehealth students are aware of the benefits of emotional expression in learning, they perceive a cultural pressure to be emotionally suppressive if they want to maintain a favorable impression and achieve their goals. We highlight implications for biology education research with examples of possible future research areas related to the expansion of social-emotional learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education.NEW & NOTEWORTHY The exploration of cultural influences on prehealth students' emotional expression behavior in education contexts brings awareness to potential targets of cultural reform efforts to increase social and behavioral professional skills development. Feeling rules in undergraduate prehealth education are examined and identified in this study. Results suggest that prehealth students perceive an emotionally unsafe learning environment, which may hinder emotional intelligence development. We advocate for research related to increasing social-emotional learning in prehealth education.