Emotions and learning
People often believe that positive emotions are better than negative emotions for students learning. But empirical research has provided a more complex picture, such that positive emotions cannot be always beneficial for students’ learning. Likewise, negative emotions can be sometimes beneficial for students’ achievement. When and how can negative emotions facilitate learning despite their general negative impacts? How similarly do positive and negative emotions affect learning? Answers to these questions are critical to understanding how best to facilitate students’ emotions in an educational setting. In our research, we aim to provide insights into these questions by examining the effects of emotions on each of the cognitive processes critical for students’ learning, including perception, attention, memory encoding, memory consolidation, goal setting, and problem solving. To understand the underlying mechanisms of the complex effects of emotions, we use a range of methods, including behavioral experiments, physiological assessments, computational modelling, neuroimaging and longitudinal surveys.
Relevant Papers
Sakaki, M., Gorlick, M. A., & Mather, M. (2011). Differential interference effects of negative emotional states on subsequent semantic and perceptual processing. Emotion, 11, 1263-1278. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0026329 OSF Link Request PDF Article
Sakaki, M., Meliss, S., Murayama, K., Yomogida, Y., Matsumori, K., Sugiura, A., Matsumoto, M. & Matsumoto, K. (2022). Motivated for near impossibility: How task type and reward modulate task enjoyment and the striatal activation for extremely difficult task. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 23, 30–41. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-022-01046-4 OSF Link Request PDF Article
Kurdi, V., Fukuzumi, N., Ishii, R., Tamura, A., Nakazato, N., Ohtani, K., Ishikawa, S., Suzuki, T., Sakaki, M., Murayama, K. & Tanaka, A. (2023). Transmission of basic psychological need satisfaction between parents and adolescents: The critical role of parental perceptions. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 15, 157-169. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506231153012 OSF Link Request PDF Article
Sakaki, M., Murayama, K., Frenzel, A. C., Goetz, T., Marsh, H. W., Lichtenfeld, S., & Pekrun, R. (2023). Developmental trajectories of achievement emotions in mathematics during adolescence. Child Development, 95(1), 276–295. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13996 OSF Link Request PDF Article
Sakaki, M., Murayama, K., Izuma, K., Aoki, R., Yomogita, Y., Sugiura, A., Singhi, N., Matsumoto, M., & Matsumoto, K. (2024). Motivated with joy or anxiety: Does approach-avoidance goal framing elicit differential reward-network activation in the brain? Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-024-01154-3 OSF Link Request PDF Article
Sakaki, M., Ten, A., Stone, H., & Murayama, K. (2024). Role of metacognitive confidence judgments in curiosity: Different effects of confidence on curiosity across epistemic and perceptual domains. Cognitive Science, 48(6), e13474. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13474 OSF Link Request PDF Article
Sakaki, M., Murayama, K., Frenzel, A. C., Goetz, T., Marsh, H., & Lichtenfeld, S., Wünsche, M., & Pekrun, R. (2025). Parents’ academic expectations and aspirations predict students’ achievement emotions. Journal of Educational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000959 OSF Link
Lin, W. M., FitzGibbon, L., Theobald, M., Breitwieser, J. Brod, G., Murayama, K., & Sakaki,M. (in press) The dynamic interplay between goal setting, performance, and emotions in self-regulated learning: A computational modeling approach. Journal of Educational Psychology (In Press) OSF Link
