Effects of Peers' Emotions on Students' Emotions, Achievement Goals, Mental Effort, and Performance

Emotion transmission often occurs in social interactions but has attracted limited attention in the education domain. Given the frequent interactions among teachers and students, not only teachers' emotions but also peers' emotions may influence students' learning. This preregistered experimental study investigated how peers' emotions (either enjoyment, neutral state, or frustration) affect students' emotion, motivation, and cognition in observational learning of playing a science game. University students (N = 210) watched a video in which a peer model played a game and displayed either enjoyment, a neutral state, or frustration. The data were analyzed by random intercept cross-lagged panel models with Bayesian estimation and generalized order-restricted information criterion approximation. We ran two set of analyses. In Analysis A, we used the peer emotion display that was intended as the condition variable, excluding participants who perceived a different emotion. In Analysis B, we used participants' perception of the peer emotion as the condition variable. Both Analyses A and B revealed that students exposed to peers' enjoyment reported higher enjoyment, relaxation, mastery-approach goals, and game performance, and lower frustration, anger, boredom, and mental effort than those exposed to peers' frustration. We conclude that peers' emotions affect students' achievement emotions, mastery-approach goals, mental effort, and game performance differentially. Educators and researchers should attend to emotion transmission among their students and the role of contagion in education.