Antecedents of Achievement Emotions: Mixed-Device Assessment with Italian and Australian University Students

Abstract

We focused on cross-cultural comparisons on achievement emotions, as those emotions associated to learning activities or outcomes. An advantageous way to investigate them is using on-line assessment tools, enabling users to gather data in economic ways. We involved 206 Italian and Australian first-year university students, who were administered an on-line questionnaire measuring challenge and threat appraisals, two emotion regulation strategies, and ten achievement emotions. The results indicated cross-cultural differences for threat, reappraisal, positive deactivating, negative activating, and negative deactivating emotions. Path analyses showed that challenge and threat appraisals, and reappraisal and suppression strategies, coherently predicted achievement emotions, with some exceptions, invariantly across groups. These findings confirm the usefulness of using on-line assessment, and inform on cross-cultural comparisons on achievement emotions, documenting differences in their mean levels, but supporting the universality of the relationships between antecedents and subsequent emotions.