Differential Emotion Effects: Both Positive and Negative Emotions Boost Performance in Mathematics

• In Event: Poster Session 8
  In Poster Session: Students' Emotions and Learning

Abstract

We investigated the differential effects of emotions on generative and evaluative thinking in mathematics. We hypothesized that positive affective states would facilitate generative thinking, whereas negative affective states would support evaluative thinking. We randomly assigned mathematics university students (N = 246) to one of three emotion conditions (enjoyment, anxiety, and neutral) and instructed them to solve either a generation or evaluation task. Our results indicated that enjoyment facilitated the generation of original ideas whereas anxiety led to better discrimination between true and false statements. These results confirm that positive and negative activating emotions can facilitate task performance in mathematics in complementary ways and suggest differential functions of emotions for mathematical reasoning, depending on the cognitive task.

Authors

• Sandra Becker, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

• Reinhard Pekrun, University of Essex

• Stefan Ufer, University of Munich

• Christof Kuhbandner, University of Regensburg