Implicit beliefs of emotions in elementary school children

Achievement contexts are laden with emotional experiences and the importance of emotions in the achievement domain is reflected by the surge of research on achievement emotions in recent decades. Longitudinal studies, however, have shown that students develop a more negative emotional pattern over time. Thus, an important competency for students is to be able to regulate the emotions they experience during schooling. This seems to be particularly relevant early on, given that negative emotional trends have already been found during the first years. Whether or not people make use of emotion regulation strategies, however, depends on their beliefs about the nature of the emotions they experience. Research by Dweck and colleagues suggests that people differ in the extent to which they think that emotions are malleable or fixed in nature (Ford & Gross, 2019).

While research on implicit beliefs about emotions in adolescence and adulthood has received increasing interest in the recent years, studies on implicit beliefs about emotions in young children has not received much research attention. Thus, the current project seeks to investigate elementary school students’ implicit beliefs they hold and to examine if emotion beliefs are already linked to children’s emotion regulation and school wellbeing in these early years of schooling. Finally, we seek to test if students’ beliefs differ as a function of gender and class level to shed light on the question if a group of students is particularly prone to regarding emotions as a force that they cannot do much to change.

Project management: Prof. Dr. Stephanie Lichtenfeld

Cooperation partner: Prof. Dr. Daniela Raccanello, Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology and Educational Psychology, Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona