7.2.2. Effect of metacognitive experiences on emotional experiences
Another important contribution of this study was the identification
of several discrete emotion experiences influenced by
feeling of difficulty and feeling of success. Feeling of difficulty
negatively predicted joy and contentment and positively predicted
hopelessness (i.e. the more the child perceived the math
task as difficult the less he/she experienced joy and contentment
and the more he/she experienced hopelessness after resolving the
task). Although we expected feeling of difficulty to positively
predict unpleasant emotions and to negatively predict pleasant
emotions, lack of previous evidence prevented us from making
predictions on discrete emotion (hypothesis 3). Our results
confirmed the direction of the prediction we hypothesized and
pointed out that not all of the pleasant or unpleasant emotions we
assessed were predicted by feeling of difficulty but only joy,
contentment and hopelessness. Based on Efklides' (2001, 2002)
finding that feeling of difficulty is related to estimate of effort
expenditure (i.e. the more the child perceived the task as difficult
the more effort he believed he had to produce to resolve the task)
and on the general assumption that emotions serve an adaptive
function by enabling a flexible behaviour (Scherer, 1984; Scherer
et al., 2001) we make the hypothesis that feeling of difficulty by
influencing emotional experience signals disruption in task processing
and provides students with the possibility to adjust their
behaviour in an adaptive manner by investing more effort to
complete task demands. In other words, feeling of difficulty might
provide input that some regulation is needed to overcome the