An intervention program promoting abilities to recognize and use psychological lexicon on achievement emotions with secondary school students

Within educational psychology, achievement emotions have recently roused particular interest for both their theoretical and applied importance (Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2014). Notwithstanding the large amount of research studies focused on them, scarce attention has been paid to specific interventions aiming at developing the abilities necessary to understand and describe achievement emotions, considering these abilities as key components of the construct of emotional competence (Denham, 1998). Therefore, we involved 74 seventh-graders (included in an experimental or in a control group) to test the efficacy of an eight-units intervention program aiming at promoting abilities to recognize and use psychological lexicon related to achievement emotions, embedded within the domain of Italian. First, the students were emotionally involved in a stable way during the whole intervention, with positive emotions more intense than negative emotions. Second, after the intervention students’ abilities to recognize and use psychological lexicon related to achievement emotions improved. Third, the positive effects of the intervention generalized to achievement emotions associated with the domain of Italian and partially of school in general. Finally, these emotions were coherently related to students’ final achievement in Italian. Acknowledging limitations such as the nature of self-report data or the short duration of the intervention, we provided evidence-based indications on the goodness of the program. From an applied perspective, our findings encourage the development of further intervention programs focused on other components of the emotional competence, such as the ability to regulate emotions, based on the awareness of the role played by achievement emotions within school contexts.