Emotion regulation and achievement emotions in elementary school children: longitudinal data

The role played by achievement emotions in influencing students’ wellbeing and performance is increasingly gathering attention within the psychological literature (Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2014). However, just a few studies have focused on how emotion regulation, one possible antecedent of achievement emotions, may affect achievement emotions over time within specific contexts. Therefore, our main aim was to examine how elementary school students’ emotion regulation predicted achievement emotions across the elementary school years, examining also how achievement emotions changed over time. In the present study 308 Italian children were asked to complete two self-report instruments when attending second and fourth grade and one year later these two cohorts were again investigated. On both occasions students answered the “How I Feel” questionnaire (HIF, Walden, Harris, & Catron, 2003) to evaluate their emotion regulation abilities, and the “Achievement Emotions Questionnaire–Elementary School” (AEQ–ES, Lichtenfeld, Pekrun, Stupnisky, Reiss, & Murayama, 2012) to assess three emotions (enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom) within domains (Italian, mathematics). Results revealed decreases in positive emotions and increases in negative emotions over time. In addition, we found that emotion regulation abilities could play a role as antecedents of students’ emotional experiences, as assumed by Pekrun’s control-value theory (2006). Despite limitations, this knowledge could be useful in planning intervention programs to promote students’ wellbeing and performance, focusing on emotion regulation as an important source of achievement emotions.