Emotion regulation abilities and achievement emotions in primary school children

Nowadays, great attention has been devoted to the role played by emotions within school contexts, given its relevance for students’ wellbeing and performance (Pekrun & Linnenbrick-Garcia, 2014). However, just a few studies have focused on how emotion regulation, a component of emotional competence (Denham, 1998), may affect achievement emotions within specific contexts. Therefore, our aim was to describe primary school children’s emotion regulation abilities, exploring their relationships with several distinct achievement emotions. The participants were 846 Italian second- and fourth-graders and their parents. The children completed two self-reports instruments, the “How I Feel” questionnaire (HIF, Walden, Harris, & Catron, 2003) to evaluate their emotionality and emotion regulation abilities, and the “Achievement Emotions Questionnaire–Elementary School” (AEQ–ES, Lichtenfeld, Pekrun, Stupnisky, Reiss, & Murayama, 2012) to evaluate three emotions referring to two different domains (Italian, mathematics) and three school settings (class, test, homework). Their parents completed the “Emotion Regulation Checklist” (ERC, Shields & Cicchetti, 1997), an other-report instrument measuring children’s emotion regulation and lability/negativity. The results show that children’s emotion regulation abilities are more sophisticated in the later years, but at the same time older children feel less positive and more negative emotions concerning their life. In addition, emotion regulation abilities predict the intensity of achievement emotions felt by children in specific contexts, indicating that these abilities seem to be important antecedents of students’ emotional experiences. Despite limitations, this knowledge could be useful in planning intervention programs to promote students’ wellbeing and performance, focusing on emotion regulation as an antecedent of achievement emotions.