A Review of Emotion Regulation in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Having improved emotional (affective) state may have several benefits on learners, such as promoting higher cognitive flexibility and opens the learner to discovery of new ideas and possibilities. On other side, negative emotional states like boredom and frustration have been linked with less use of self-regulation and cognitive strategies for learning as well as increases in disengaged and disturbing behavior during learning. In the area of computerised learning, several researchers strongly agree that intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) would significantly improve its performance if it can adapt to the affective state (emotional state) of the learners. This idea has spawned an important trend in the development of ITSs, which are systems with the ability to regulate a learner's adverse emotions. In the present study, we discuss the existing studies that have implemented different emotion regulation strategies such as coping strategies and implementation of these strategies in the domain of intelligent tutoring system (ITS). The results of the review show that applying emotion regulation strategies during computerised learning may produce more optimistic emotions as well as better learning gain.