Thinking impacts feeling : Judgments of school domain similarity and between-domain relations of students’ academic emotions

Abstract

The focus of this study is to identify the factors that influence between-domain relations for academic emotions. Knowledge on this topic is important, as it can guide assessment (i.e., domain-specific vs. domain-general measurement) and inform educators as to whether students’ emotional experiences in one academic domain are related to their experiences in another.Existing research indicates that between-domain relations of academic emotions are, on average, relatively weak (e.g., Goetz et al., 2007; Marsh & Yeung, 1996). The relationships observed between the same emotion in two different subject domains have been found to differ in strength, with some domain pairs showing relatively strong relations, such as mathematics and physics, and other domains showing emotions to be unrelated (e.g., mathematics and English). Interestingly, virtually all of the previous research on this topic is based on assessing trait (habitual) emotions without examining whether the same pattern holds for state emotions.Further, we lack knowledge on why trait academic emotions are domain-specific in nature and, more specifically, why the relations between emotions in some domain pairs (e.g., mathematics/physics) are stronger than those in others (e.g., mathematics/English). We investigated one possible reason for this observed pattern: students’ cognitive judgments of the degree of similarity between domains. There exists considerable theoretical support for the premise that students’ judgments of similarities between subject domains are primarily related to corresponding similarities in their trait-based emotions that are known to be strongly impacted by belief systems (accessibility model of emotional self-report, Robinson & Clore, 2002). In contrast, such cognitions are substantially less likely to have an impact on real-time (i.e., state) academic emotions as experienced by students in a given situation. We hypothesized that the degree of similarity in the relations between academic emotions across domains, and students’ judgments of between-domain characteristics, would be moderated by the method of assessment. That is, the degree of similarity was expected to be stronger for trait as compared to state assessments.A series of three studies that included German 8th and 11th graders addressed this research question. In Study 1, exploratory interviews with students (N = 40) identified 13 salient characteristics of academic domains. Study 2 assessed these 13 domain characteristics quantitatively using a questionnaire-based trait assessment (N = 1,709). Consistent with our assumption, the pattern of between-domain relations of academic emotions, namely enjoyment, pride, anxiety, anger, and boredom, reflected the pattern of relations observed among the 13 characteristics across the domains of mathematics, physics, German, and English. However, findings from Study 3 employing an experience sampling approach to assess between-domain relations in real-time (N = 121) showed that between-domain relations for state emotions did not replicate the pattern observed for domain characteristics. Students’ judgments of academic domains appeared to be more salient in trait as compared to state assessments, thus aligning with our hypothesis that between-domain relations of trait academic emotions may be largely based on students’ perceptions of similarities between academic domains.