ABSTRACT
Achievement emotions are essential for human learning, development, and performance. This is especially true for positive achievement emotions such as enjoyment of learning activities, hope for success, or pride in one’s accomplishments. Positive emotions help envision goals and challenges, open the mind to creative problem solving, lay the groundwork for students’ self-regulation, and protect health by fostering self-esteem and resiliency. Even negative achievement emotions such as anger, anxiety, or shame can sometimes be beneficial. Until recently, these emotions did not receive much attention by researchers except studies on test anxiety (Zeidner, 1998). During the past dozen years, however, there has been growing recognition that emotions are central to students’ academic agency. In this nascent research, emotions are recognized as being of critical importance for students’ learning and achievement (Efklides & Volet, 2005; Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2013; Schutz & Pekrun, 2007).
