Could the impact of emotional states on learning in children vary with task difficulty?

Abstract

Emotions are known to influence memory, in particular retention and recall, with positive emotions enhancing performances and negative emotions showing mixed effects. Although the influence of emotions on memory is well-established, their precise impact on the learning process remains a matter of debate and investigation. We implemented two experiments with children aged 6 to 8 years to examine how different emotional states affect training with tasks of varying difficulty. In Experiment 1, children were assessed in a letter recognition task and were assigned to positive, negative, or neutral emotional training conditions. Results showed significant performance improvements across all emotional conditions, indicating that emotional states did not differentially affect this task. In Experiment 2, using a more difficult non-word dictation task, significant improvements were found only in the positive and neutral conditions but not in the negative condition, suggesting that task difficulty modulates the impact of emotional states. These findings highlight the importance of considering both emotional states and task difficulty in educational settings. Positive and neutral emotions may facilitate cognitive processes under challenging conditions, whereas negative emotions might hinder them.