Het ervaren van emoties in de klas: de rol van medeleerlingen en leerkrachten in de dynamieken van academische emoties bij leerlingen

The emotions that students experience in school are highly important for their well-being, motivation and academic success (Camacho-Morles et al., 2021; Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012). It is therefore imperative to understand how these emotions emerge, fluctuate, and spread in school. The present dissertation provides a comprehensive investigation into how secondary school students' academic emotions—enjoyment, enthusiasm, boredom, and frustration—are shaped by individual, situational, and social contextual factors. While emotions are dynamic state-like constructs that are constructed in interaction with one's social environment (Boiger & Mesquita, 2012; Pekrun, 2006; Scherer & Moors, 2019), research on academic emotions has mainly approached them as static individual traits and paid limited attention to the contribution of the social classroom environment to these emotions. This dissertation aimed to address these gaps in four empirical chapters by acknowledging the temporally dynamic, situated and socially embedded nature of academic emotions, and specifically focused on emotional transmission in the classroom. Chapter 1 established the dynamic and situational nature of academic emotions by using experience sampling, showing that students' emotions fluctuate as a function of temporal factors like day of the week and time of the day, and situational factors like teaching methods. Chapter 2 provided evidence for real-time crossover of enthusiasm from teachers, finding that student-specific and class perceptions of teacher enthusiasm, but not teacher self-reported enthusiasm, positively related to student enthusiasm over time. The crossover was stronger for students with closer relationships with their teacher, and these students also experienced higher overall enthusiasm in class. The strength of teacher-student crossover generalized across student ability levels. Chapter 3 demonstrated the real-time crossover of academic emotions from classmates, even when controlling for features of the shared learning environment. These crossover effects were more pronounced between same-sex classmates, particularly for negative emotions. Chapter 4 shifted to longer-term emotion transmission using social network analysis. It found that students' academic trait boredom increased over time to converge with higher boredom levels of their classroom friends, even after accounting for selection and structural network effects. Neither teacher-student relationship quality nor cognitive ability moderated this peer influence, although higher teacher-student relationship quality protected against increases in boredom throughout the school year. Overall, the findings indicate that academic emotions are inherently relational and dynamic, emphasizing the critical role of both teachers and peers in shaping students' emotional lives in school. It concludes that fostering positive teacher-student relationships and positive emotional exchanges with teachers and peers are vital to enhancing students' emotional experiences and academic success.