6.3.4. Interim discussion
Summing up, positive and negative activation as dimensions of the learners’ emotional state predicted performance on retention tasks, albeit in a very subtle way. Furthermore, positive activation very slightly affected comprehension and negative activation very slightly affected transfer performance. However, the valence of the emotional state seems to play a minor role, as valence did not pre- dict any of the learning outcome measures. Taken together, the results support the idea that learners’ emotional states during learning affect learning outcomes – although the variance explained by the emotional states is very small. However, the more specific assumptions about the relationships between positive and negative emotional states and the different learning outcome mea- sures are only partly supported. In line with our expectations, the results showed that a more positive emotional state fosters more complex learning goals such as comprehension and transfer (hypothesis 2.1). We further expected that negative emotional states foster retention. Contrary to our expectation, we found that retention performance was facilitated by more positive and less negative activation (hypothesis 2.2). Taken together, our results showed that positive emotional states facilitated learning out- comes, whereas negative emotional states did not have the expected positive effect but instead hindered learning.