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.
