During adolescence, there is an increase in youths' experiences of negative emotions such as anger and sadness, with additional evidence for substantial day-to-day variability in those emotional experiences (Maciejewski et al., 2017). Adolescents' negative emotional reactivity and emotion dysregulation affect their psychological adjustment (Larson et al., 2002), and impede their academic success (Arsenio & Loria, 2014), regardless of their cognitive abilities (Leeson et al., 2008). Given that adolescents spend most of their days in school, schools are a prime context in which to focus on how emotions impact functioning and how different learning environments can help mitigate the academic consequences of emotion-regulation difficulties. Moreover, research on adolescents' sensitivity to rewards and punishments (i.e., feedback sensitivity) may help clarify the role of emotion regulation on adolescents' school success. Compared to adults, adolescents tend to be more sensitive to rewards and less sensitive to punishments (Steinberg, 2008). However, there are important individual differences in adolescents' feedback sensitivity that may affect their learning. For example, youth with ADHD symptoms evidenced a heightened sensitivity to immediate punishment, whereas youth with reading disorders exhibited dampened sensitivity to punishment (Poon & Ho, 2014). Further, several experimental studies of learning have demonstrated the adaptiveness of reward sensitivity for learning and memory (Davidow et al., 2016).
The present proposal merges these lines of research to provide an integrative examination of the cognitive and emotional correlates of adolescent learning and academic performance. We intend to address this aim in two innovative ways: (1) employ ecological momentary assessment (EMA) approaches to examine the influence of negative emotions on youths' academic performance; (2) consider the implications of adolescents' feedback sensitivity on their learning.
The school is the "social glue" that keeps physically and socially the local population sufficiently in touch to function as a community (Kearns et al., 2010). Beyond providing an education to children, schools are contexts critical for socio-emotional development. Better school performance and greater well-being are associated with effective mastery of socio-emotional competencies, whereas the failure to achieve competence in these areas can lead to a variety of personal, social, and academic difficulties (Weissberg & Greenberg, 1998). However, little work has been conducted to examine at the same time the role that multiple domains, such as emotion regulation and feedback sensitivity, have in predicting academic performance. In these terms, this proposal aims to contribute to fill this gap in the empirical literature by exploring learning as a function of individual differences in feedback sensitivity and emotion regulation in adolescence.
An important question for research in the next decade is: how can researchers consider emotional development in the context of learning to promote adolescents' successful academic performance? A prospective methodological breakthrough that will help answer this question is ecological momentary assessment (EMA), which measures day-to-day variability in youths' emotional experiences. Specifically we aim to implement a mobile EMA study with automated cell phone approach (with the support of Qualtrics technology). Unlike questionnaire data, EMA data do not inherently rely on retrospective reports. Nor do they require researchers to experimentally "create" real-life conditions. We will also present results from a multilevel analyses, specifying two levels: A within-person level (Level 1: between days) and a between-person level (Level 2: between persons) (Bolger et al., 2003). The within-person level (Level 1) specifies that each person's score for a certain variable is composed of his or her average score plus that score's deviation from his or her average, whereas the between-person level (Level 2) specifies that a certain score is composed of the overall mean score across all participants and a particular participant's deviation from that overall mean (Bolger et al., 2003). Results of the multilevel analysis will be presented and the implications of these findings for research and theory will be discussed.
An additional area of inquiry for the field of youth development is how psychological and behavioral characteristics inherent to youth (such as reward sensitivity), which have been frequently linked to undesirable outcomes, are also linked to adaptive behaviors such as learning. For decades, much of the research on youth development has focused on preventing undesirable behaviors. Yet, the absence of dysfunction does not inherently amount to the presence of positive functioning. Thus, researchers must understand how to help adolescents thrive, in addition to preventing negative developmental outcomes.
Two additional considerations for advancing the science of learning and research on youth development more broadly are the application of scientific findings to real-world contexts. With our proposal, we aim to contribute to the scientific literature that can be insightful to improve the well-being of adolescents across the world. To do that, it is essential that researchers consider the contexts in which adolescents develop, such as schools. Further, there is a need for researchers to conduct studies with practical applications to the lives of adolescents. Our study will shed light on how one component of learning (i.e., feedback sensitivity), is affected by youths' emotion-regulation skills. These domains have rarely been examined together in the context of learning. The proposed studies address these gaps in the literature and the findings may provide educators working with youth who struggle with negative emotions and impaired regulation new perspectives on how to structure the learning environment in a way that helps youth learn.
Finally, our proposed study uses a novel, innovative design that combines ecological and experimental methods to examine the relative influence of feedback sensitivity and emotions on learning and academic performance during adolescence, a critical period during which emotional experiences are highly salient and self-regulatory abilities are still developing. The proposed study represents our initiative to study the real-world implications of adolescents' feedback sensitivity and emotionality. The implications of our findings have great potential to enhance prevention and intervention strategies to promote positive youth development.