EXAMINING HOW POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EMOTIONS INFLUENCE COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Few studies have examined the impact of emotions on cognitive (not only academic) performance among adolescents and this is the objective of our research. After ethic committee agreement andparents’ authorization, we asked 158 adolescents in secondary schools to respond to the French version of Differential Emotion Scale adapted for school context and to nineteensyllogisms which evaluated cognitive nonacademic performances. As results, we expected that negative emotions related to academic achievement would reduce performance in reasoning and positive emotions would improve it. Our hypotheses were partially validated. The impacts of the results as well as perspectives of future researches in relation with self-esteem, psychological disengagement, dropping out of school were discussed.