Are Implicit Theories About Emotion and Motivation Differentially Related to Motivational and Emotional Self-Regulation?

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

Abstract

Despite the close conceptual links between motivation and emotion, research has mainly treated motivational and emotional self-regulation as separate constructs. More recently, however, it was shown that students mainly use similar, but also some distinct strategies to deal with motivational and emotional challenges during learning (Stockinger et al., 2023). This suggests that self-regulation of motivation and emotion are not fully separable, which may result from similar personal beliefs learners hold about their motivation and emotion and how to regulate them. Within the domains of motivation and emotion, previous research demonstrated that learners holding malleability theories (implicit theories that motivation and emotions are generally controllable and malleable experiences) were more likely to use self-regulation strategies in the respective domain (Tamir et al., 2007; Thoman et al., 2018; Trautner & Schwinger, 2022). This relation was partly mediated by self-efficacy beliefs: The stronger peoples’ self-efficacy beliefs regarding how able they personally are to effectively regulate their motivation and emotions, the more likely they are to regulate and the more effectively they do so (Benfer et al., 2018; Trautner & Schwinger, 2020). However, these studies examined beliefs about motivation and emotion and their relations with respective regulation separately, providing no insights into their interplay. Therefore, the current study examined whether learners hold different beliefs (malleability theories and self-efficacy beliefs) about their motivation vs. emotion. It further examines whether these beliefs are mainly related to regulation strategy use within their respective domain, but also across domains.
To this end, N = 399 German university students (Mage = 23.46, SDage = 3.82, 71.9% women) reported their implicit theories about motivation and emotion, their self-efficacy for motivation and emotion regulation, as well as their use of motivation and emotion regulation strategies (Table 1). Confirmatory factor analyses revealed four separable factors for malleability theories about emotion and motivation and self-efficacy for motivation and emotion regulation, whereby latent correlations between motivation and emotion within the respective beliefs (r = .66/.76) tended to be higher compared to those across beliefs (.41 < r < .65). As expected, structural equation modelling showed that within each domain (motivation/emotion), malleability beliefs were associated with more self-efficacy for self-regulation (β = .66/.32, p < .01), which was in turn related to more frequent strategy use (β = .48/.74, p < .01). Across domains, only malleability beliefs about motivation were related to self-efficacy for emotion regulation (β = .34, p < .01). Self-efficacy for emotion regulation was even negatively associated with motivation regulation (β = -.33, p < .01).
These findings reveal that similar to motivational and emotional regulation strategies, leaners’ beliefs about motivation and emotion show considerable conceptual closeness, although they are factorially separable. However, they mainly relate to regulation strategy use within their respective domains, potentially explaining between-person differences in tendencies to use motivational or emotional strategies. Cross-domain relations were weaker or even negative, potentially as a result of cross-domain comparisons similar to the internal/external frame of reference model of academic self-concept and achievement (Marsh, 1986). Directions for future research will be discussed.

Authors

• Maike Trautner, Philipps-University Marburg

• Malte Schwinger, Philipps-University Marburg