The Interplay Between Emotion Regulation Goals, Emotion Regulation Strategies, and Emotions With Two Learner Populations

• In Event: Motivational Regulation Meets Emotional Regulation: Understanding Their Conceptual and Functional Interplay in Academic Settings

Abstract

Educational research studies have yet to explore the goals learners pursue when engaging in emotion regulation (ER) strategies. This is an important gap in the ER literature because motivation is a driving factor behind individuals' selection of ER strategies as well as their decision to regulate their emotions (or not; Harley et al., 2019). We address this gap in the current study while also considering differences between various emotions and situational contexts that are also known to influence ER (Rottweiler et al., 2023). Our study was guided by the ER in Achievement Situations Model (Harley et al., 2019) which integrates and extends Gross’ (2015) process model of ER and Pekrun’s (2006) control-value theory of achievement emotions. We sought to answer three research questions: (RQ1) What ER goals do students set? (RQ2) Do ER goals cluster with ER strategies and the emotions they target? (RQ3) Are clusters similar between two different populations and the learning activities they engaged in?
We report findings from a multi-institutional study including 30 medical residents and 88 undergraduate students from two North American universities. Medical residents completed a high-fidelity medical simulation in teams to diagnose and save the life of a patient. Undergraduate students completed a scenario-based, collaborative mid-term examination. Participants completed a newly developed Educational Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Edu-ERQ; Figure 1), modified and extended from Webster & Hadwin (2012, 2014). In this paper, we drew on three items from the Edu-ERQ: (1) the emotion participants sought to regulate (drop-down list), (2) their goal for regulating this emotion (open-ended response), and (3) the ER strategy they used to regulate the identified emotion (drop-down list; Table 1, 2). Participants’ open-ended responses to the question about ER goals were coded based on definitions from Tamir’s (2009) hedonic and instrumental ER goals (see Table 3). Two coders had a 97% pre-discussion agreement rate. 2-step cluster analyses were performed on each sample’s emotions (categorized into valence and arousal quadrants), ER goals, and ER strategies.
We were able to categorize 90% of medical residents and 95.5% of undergraduate students’ ER goals using our coding scheme. A similar proportion of medical residents and undergraduate students held instrumental (63%; 64%) and hedonic (27%; 32%) ER goals (Table 4). We were able to successfully cluster ER goals, ER strategies, and emotions based on “good” silhouette measures of cohesion and separation. Three clusters emerged for medical residents and six for undergraduate students (Table 5). ER goals were the strongest contributing variable to clusters.
Findings identified instrumental goals as more widely held than hedonic by both populations and with similar proportions. Medical residents’ Clusters 1 and 2 were replicated with undergraduate students (Clusters 1 and 4), but not Cluster 3. Findings provide novel evidence that ER goals are meaningfully associated with both the emotions people aim to manage and the strategies they use to do so, but that context (e.g., population, task) influence the intersections between motivation, emotions, and ER. Future educational ER interventions and research should consider and measure ER goals alongside ER strategies.

Authors

• Jason Matthew Harley, McGill University

• Matthew Moreno, University of Central Florida

• Keerat Kaur Grewal, McGill University

• Sayed Azher, McGill University

• Allyson F. Hadwin, University of Victoria

• Mariel F.W. Miller, University of Victoria

• Susanne P. Lajoie, McGill University

• Reinhard Pekrun, University of Essex

• Jeffrey Wiseman, McGill University

• Ning-Zi Sun, McGill University

• Danielle S. Shafiepour, McGill University