ABSTRACT
In psychological research, considerable attention has been given to the importance of emotions for human thought and action. In experimental studies, emotions and moods have been found to influence a range of cognitive processes that are relevant to academic learning, such as attention, memory storage and retrieval, and problem solving. Two effects that are especially important for the academic context are mood-congruent memory recall and retrieval-induced forgetting and facilitation. In traditional accounts of positive emotions based on experimental laboratory research, positive emotions have often been considered maladaptive for performance. Positive emotions were thought to induce unrealistic optimism, foster superficial information processing, and reduce motivation to pursue challenging goals. The effects of negative activating emotions are more variable, due to their complex effects on different components of learning processes. The relationships of test anxiety with learning and performance have been analyzed in hundreds of studies.
