Coping with failures: how emotions, individual traits, expectation-importance and prior experience affect reactions to violated achievement expectations

When trying to stabilize expectations, it is most helpful to frame communication around importance and confirming evidence. The effect of confirming evidence is much greater than that of disconfirming evidence. While two academic emotions, namely confusion and annoyance, increase the intentions to exert efforts and decrease the likelihood of immunization, their effect is also much smaller than the effect of importance. Finally, we conclude that older individuals accommodate more, and higher Tolerance of Ambiguity makes it more likely to maintain expectations despite discrepancies.