The relative importance of setting versus domain for students’ achievement emotions

Introduction. Achievement emotions, as those emotions related to achievement activities or outcomes, are recently assuming a central role in educational psychology. According to the control-value theory (Pekrun, 2006), they are characterized by two underlying dimensions, valence (positive versus negative emotions) and activation (activating versus deactivating emotions), and can be described in terms of both antecedents and consequences. Within this theoretical framework, our aim was to explore the relative importance of setting versus domain for the structures of achievement emotions. Method. The participants were 527 Italian students, including 134 fourth-graders (Mage = 9:9 years; range: 9:1-10:9; 63 girls), 160 seventh-graders (Mage = 12:9 years; range: 12:4-14:3; 75 girls), and 233 eleventh-graders (Mage = 17:0 years; range: 15:8-19:1; 124 girls). The students completed two written questionnaires on Italian and mathematics, in which they were asked to imagine being involved in four school settings (attending a class, doing homework, taking an oral/written test). For every setting, they indicated how much they imagined feeling each of ten discrete emotions on a 5-point Likert-type scale, including three positive-activating (enjoyment, pride, hope), two positive-deactivating (relief, relaxation), three negative-activating (anxiety, anger, guilt), and two negative-deactivating (boredom, hopelessness) emotions. Results and discussion. A confirmatory multitrait-multimethod analysis (MTMM) was carried out, applying a specific case of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the correlated uniqueness (CU) approach (Byrne, 2010). The results suggest the higher salience of domains rather than settings in explaining all the ten achievement emotions investigated, in line with the domain-specificity documented in literature. However, the patterns in the data were best explained when settings were also accounted for in the model. These data confirm our hypothesis, according to which, in case of higher salience of one of the investigated contextual factors, representation of reality is more complete whether considering also the other construct. From an applied perspective, these findings could be used by psychologists, teachers, and parents to directly interact with students, in order to foster their wellbeing, with a higher awareness about their emotional experiences