Emotions at School

Reinhard Pekrun, Krista R. Muis, Anne C. Frenzel, Thomas Goetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138733091
• eBook ISBN: 9781351741255
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Gestione comportamentale

For more than a decade, there has been growing interest in the role of emotions in academic settings. Written by leading experts on learning and instruction, Emotions at School focuses on the connections between educational research and emotion science, bringing the subject to a wider audience. With chapters on how emotions develop and work, evidence-based recommendations about how to foster adaptive emotions, and clear explanations of key concepts and ideas, this concise volume is designed for any education course that includes emotions in the curriculum. It will be indispensable for student researchers and both pre- and in-service teachers alike.

Three
Origins, Regulation, and Development of Emotions

Given the relevance of emotions for students’ learning and achievement, it is important to consider their origins, regulation, and development. Without such knowledge, it would not be possible for practitioners to address students’ emotions in an evidence-based way, grounded in sound theory and empirical findings. Generally, emotions can be caused and regulated by many different factors. Variations in genetic dispositions explain some of the differences between students in terms of the emotions they experience, although not to the extent to which differences in cognitive abilities may depend on genes. For example, differences in levels of anxiety are influenced by genetic dispositions.¹ Situational perceptions give rise to emotions, such as the joy triggered by success and frustration induced by failure. Neurohormonal processes can influence the arousal of emotions, and use of substances, such as medical drugs or alcohol, can contribute to their effects. Sensory perceptions of one’s expression of emotion in the face, gestures, and posture can feed back on the emotions that gave rise to the expression—showing an angry face can increase anger even if one does not look into the mirror. Emotion schemata stored in memory play a role; these schemata link specific stimuli to emotional arousal, such as perceptions of snakes causing fear due to the biologically prepared link between snakes representing threat and the evolutionarily adaptive reaction to avoid them.

For academic emotions, however, there is one group of factors that is likely more important than any other factor—individual appraisals of success, failure, one’s competence, and the value of achievement activities and their outcomes. In contrast to emotions aroused in phylogenetically older and more constrained situations, such as enjoyment of physiological need fulfillment or interactions between caregiver and child, emotions in academic situations pertain to culturally defined demands in settings that are a recent product of civilization. In settings of this kind, the individual has to learn how to adapt to situational demands while preserving individual autonomy—a process inevitably guided by appraisals. In other words, in settings shaped by our cultural evolution, appraisals of the situation and oneself are necessary for adaptive thought, emotion, and action.

This becomes especially clear when considering transitions in students’ educational careers, such as the transitions from kindergarten or preschool to elementary school, from there to middle school and further on to high school, or from high school to university. For example, the transition from high school to college often implies breaking habits developed during childhood and adolescence. Typically, this transition entails challenges to adapt to new academic demands; to leave one’s home, move to a new city, and live on one’s own; and to create new friendships and social networks. All of these changes make it necessary to appraise new situations and to re-appraise one’s personal strengths and weaknesses, and these appraisals certainly play a major role in the emotions that students experience.

In line with such considerations, researchers agree that appraisals are primary antecedents of the emotions occurring in academic and achievement-related settings. Most theories and empirical studies on the determinants of students’ emotions focus on the emotional relevance of self-related and task-related appraisals and on the importance of situational factors that shape students’ emotions by influencing their appraisals. In this chapter, we first discuss theory and evidence on individual antecedents of academic emotions, including appraisals as well as more distal individual factors influencing appraisals and emotions, such as students’ gender and their achievement goals. Subsequently, we discuss the role of emotion regulation and emotional competencies (called “emotional intelligence” by some authors) for students’ emotions. We then describe the role of classroom instruction and social environments for these emotions, and finally we outline how they develop over the school years. Throughout the chapter, we will use R. Pekrun’s control-value theory of achievement emotions as an organizing framework to explain researchers’ hypotheses and the existing evidence.²

Individual Origins of Emotions

Appraisals as Antecedents

Achievement Emotions

Much research on the individual determinants of students’ emotions has focused on the origins of test anxiety. Test anxiety is a prospective emotion related to threat of failure on an upcoming or ongoing evaluation (i.e., test or exam). Therefore, many authors have regarded threat-related appraisals as the proximal determinants of test anxiety. For example, from the perspective of R. Lazarus’s transactional stress model, appraisal pertains to the situational possibility and subjective importance of failure. In the secondary appraisal, possibilities to cope with the situation are explored cognitively. Depending on the combined result of the two appraisals, different emotions can be aroused. In the case of threat and insufficient perceived control over threatening failure, anxiety is assumed to be instigated. For example, when facing a difficult exam, you may first ask yourself if the exam is sufficiently important to care about. If the answer is yes, you may subsequently wonder if your abilities are sufficient and if you can prepare sufficiently well to succeed. If you deem the exam to be important and feel out of control because you feel you lack ability and are not prepared, you may feel fearful about the prospect of possibly failing the exam.

Lazarus’s analysis suggests that test-related anxiety is aroused when two conditions are met. First, the upcoming test is deemed important. Second, the individual doubts whether her abilities and preparation are sufficient, thus letting her believe that she may fail the test. Research has confirmed that three related groups of appraisals are most important to predict if, and to what extent, a student is fearful before exams and in academic achievement situations more generally. The first is perceived control and the achievement expectations resulting from perceived control. Specifically, expectations of failure relate positively to anxiety—the more you expect failure, the more anxious you are. The second is perceived competence, such as students’ self-concept of ability. By self-concept, researchers mean beliefs about one’s abilities that are stored in memory. For example, your beliefs about your abilities in mathematics make up your math self-concept. Self-concepts of ability lay the foundations for expectancies of success and failure. As such, they relate negatively to anxiety—the higher your self-concept, the less you expect failure, and the less test anxious you are, all other things being equal. The third group of appraisals involves the perceived value of achievement, which relates positively to test anxiety—high importance of achievement exacerbates test anxiety.

Achievement expectations and self-concepts of ability define individuals’ self-confidence to control their achievement. For some emotions, it is important to additionally consider another group of control-related appraisals: students’ causal attributions of success and failure.⁴ For example, whereas one student may explain failure by lack of ability, another student may realize that it was lack of effort rather than lack of ability that let him fail the exam. Students can attribute their successes and failures to internal factors, such as ability and effort (internal causal attribution); alternatively, they can believe that external factors are responsible, such as difficult task demands or luck (external causal attribution).

For appraisals related to self-confidence and perceived control, a broad range of different terms has been proposed. Examples include self-concept of ability, perceived competence, judgment of knowing, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, coping potential, power, agency, locus of control, etc.⁵ Don’t be confused by the Babylonian chaos of terms in this field—while all of these concepts show subtle distinctions that may sometimes be useful to consider, all of them broadly represent individuals’ sense of self-confidence and control over achievement.

Together, these different appraisals explain the arousal of various achievement emotions, including both activity emotions and outcome emotions as described in Chapter 1 and addressed in R. Pekrun’s control-value theory and related empirical research.^2,6 For activity emotions such as enjoyment of learning and boredom, perceived competence and value are most important. Enjoyment of learning is promoted when competence is sufficient to master the material and the student is interested in the material. In contrast, in cases of feelings of incompetence or disinterest, the activity is not enjoyable. Boredom occurs when the activity lacks value—when students perceive a lecture as monotonous or learning materials as disinteresting, thus not providing sufficient stimulation, they get bored. As for perceived competence and related perceptions of task demands, boredom can occur under either of two conditions. One is under-challenge defined by low perceived demands coupled with high perceived competence to master the task. This is typical for easy and monotonous routine tasks (such as assembly line work) and sometimes also is the case for gifted students in regular classroom instruction. The other is over-challenge defined by high perceived demands coupled with low perceived competence. The research evidence suggests that boredom promoted by over-challenge is more frequent in students than boredom due to under-challenge. Many students today are faced with task demands that are overly challenging or are given materials they do not understand, thus undermining their capability to make meaning and exacerbating their boredom.

Prospective outcome emotions that relate to future success and failure depend on achievement expectations, combined with perceptions of the value (i.e., importance) of success and failure. Hope is the primary emotion related to future success that is not certain—if you deem achievement to be critically important but are not fully confident that you will be able to attain success, you may be full of hope or at least feel a little sense of hope. The opposite negative emotion related to failure is anxiety. Achievement-related anxiety comprises fear of failure and is triggered by expectancies of possible failure, coupled with perceived importance of achievement, as outlined earlier.

Both hope and anxiety involve an element of uncertainty. As such, both can be triggered when either success or failure is the possible outcome of an achievement activity but one doesn’t know exactly which one will occur. If the focus of attention is on possible success, hope is the emotion; if the focus is on possible failure, it is anxiety. Attentional focus can shift rapidly from one to the other, depending on situational triggers such as current progress in preparing for an exam. As such, students often experience an emotional roller coaster, with emotions oscillating back and forth between hope and anxiety.

However, if failure is subjectively certain and success not possible to attain, anxiety can be replaced by achievement-related hopelessness. As described in Chapter 2, hopelessness is a devastating emotion that can derail students’ educational attainment and motivate them to drop out of school and college. Hopelessness can be intense when certainty of failure is combined with high importance of achievement—if your career depends on not failing an entry exam but you have lost all hope to succeed, you may feel hopeless. Fortunately, full subjective certainty of upcoming failure is relatively rare, and true hopelessness occurs less frequently than less extreme negative emotions, such as moderate anxiety or boredom.

Retrospective outcome emotions include positive emotions such as joy and negative emotions such as frustration and sadness, which do not require much appraisal, except for evaluating one’s achievement as good versus poor. More complex retrospective emotions, however, do require more elaborate cognitive judgment. Relief can be triggered when negative expectations are not fulfilled, such as expecting a D on an exam but receiving an A instead. In contrast, disappointment is prompted when the expectation was positive but the outcome is negative. As such, both relief and disappointment are counterfactual emotions that are triggered when a prior expectation has not been fulfilled.

However, there also is a second type of relief—the type of relief one feels when a painful state ends.⁷ Both types of relief occur frequently in academia. After an exam, students can feel relief when they receive feedback that is better than expected. Alternatively, they can feel relief because the exam was stressful and is over now. It seems likely that both types of relief serve important functions to ease students’ recovery from exam stress, thus also helping their immune system and physical health. Likely, students who are suffering from chronic achievement stress and cannot experience relief are in danger of developing health problems. Research on this important function of students’ relief, however, is lacking to date.

Finally, there also are important retrospective outcome emotions that depend on appraisals of control, such as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• One: Concepts and Measurement of Emotions
• Two: Functions for Learning and Achievement
• Three: Origins, Regulation, and Development of Emotions
• Four: Teacher Emotions
• Five: Implications for Practice
• Glossary
• Index