Have you ever stressed about your schoolwork, only for that stress to create even more stress? This phenomenon—stressing about stress—is a metacognitive experience very common among students of all ages. Academic emotions impact motivation, engagement in learning processes, and learning outcomes. However, it remains unclear which emotion regulation strategies actually support learning in an academic context.
Luyao Xu, a doctoral student and research assistant at McGill, and Krista R. Muis, director of the eMUIS Lab, co-authored a systematic review exploring emotional regulation (ER) methods in self-regulated learning published in Educational Psychology Review. Xu analyzed numerous studies and articles on emotion regulation tactics elicited during learning, focusing on how emotional experiences correlate with learning performance outcomes and how the regulation strategies applied can mitigate negative impacts.
Psychology research has shown that certain emotional regulation strategies are more effective than others. Many scholars view reappraisal—a way to reevaluate a bad outcome as an opportunity to improve rather than a personal failure—as an effective strategy. Suppression, on the other hand, which involves pushing emotions aside without addressing them, is generally viewed as unhelpful in learning contexts. But do these results hold true across academic contexts?
“Recently, meta-emotive knowledge is getting more attention, like whether regulating anxiety using reappraisal is not a good idea when students are approaching an exam, because they may have used up their cognitive resources for ER rather than engaging in learning,” Zu said in an interview with The Tribune.
Zu explained that competence-oriented strategies, which improve skills in subject areas to prevent negative emotions from interfering with learning, may be more efficient than strategies typically used in clinical psychology.
“The effectiveness of the ER strategy depends on the context in which the emotion occurred. In certain contexts, students may not raise a need for regulation,” Zu explained. “For example, maybe when the exam is near, I do not identify myself as someone who needs to regulate [my] anxiety. Instead, I need to focus on reviewing the materials to get a good grade. So, […] distracting myself from my learning material is not a good way to regulate my emotions. In this case, trying to enhance my abilities is a more adaptive strategy.”
Raising awareness of academic emotions is an important step in encouraging learners to monitor how their emotions impact their well-being, learning processes, and performance outcomes. For instance, a student who recognizes that emotions are a normal part of learning may become less anxious about anxiety, allowing those emotions to shift from a burden to a tool that can support learning.
“In the learning context, the adaptiveness of ER strategy may not reflect on improved emotional experience, but rather on an improved learning performance,” Zu said. “In the learning context, most of the time, students’ ultimate goal is their learning outcome rather than their emotional experience. Since this emotional experience does have an impact on the learning processes, students regulate these emotions to prevent their negative impact.”
In response, Zu proposes the Integrated Model of Emotion Regulation in Self-Regulated Learning, linking ER, academic motivation, and learning performance on a person-level. This model focuses on students’ habitual use of ER in overall learning as well as at a task-level, examining how strategies interact with emotional states to influence task outcomes.
Emotions provide important bodily signals that can help individuals interpret and respond to their environment. When students become aware of their emotional patterns, regulation strategies can turn emotions into intentional tools that support personal flourishing.
