Achievement emotions in different school tasks and subject-matters

This study focused on achievement emotions characterizing different contexts, in terms of both scholastic tasks and subject-matters, in students from elementary and middle school. Considering the pervasiveness of different emotions in school, many scholars have studied the mutual relationships between affect and motivational or cognitive dimensions related to learning, and recently particular interest has been focused on discrete emotions rather than states pertaining to different valences. Referring to the control-value theory on achievement emotions, our study involved 330 Italian students, attending the fourth grade and the seventh grade. They completed two questionnaires, one focused on Italian and the other on Mathematics. They were asked to evaluate ten discrete emotions about two non-evaluative tasks (attending a lesson, doing homework) and two evaluative tasks (standing a written test, standing an oral test) on 5-point Likert-type scales. Results showed that, as age increased, positive emotions decreased and negative emotions increased, with some exceptions. Moreover, non-evaluative tasks were characterized by higher levels of enjoyment, pride, relief, relaxation and boredom, while evaluative tasks were characterized by higher levels of hope, anxiety, anger and fault. Finally, boredom and hopelessness were stronger for Italian rather than Mathematics. These data point out that discrete emotions are sensitive to different contexts, mostly in terms of kind of learning tasks than in terms of school subject-matters, and that they follow different developmental trends.