Exploring master’s students’ emotions and emotion-regulation in supervisory feedback situations: a vignette-based study

Abstract

Following a sociocultural perspective, this vignette-based study explored Chinese master’s students’ emotions and emotion-regulation strategies in supervisor writing feedback situations. An instrument contained 17 vignettes was developed, validated and administered among 189 participants. Individual interviews with five participants were also conducted, and written materials were collected. The findings revealed that across the 17 hypothetical scenarios, positive emotion was the most reported emotional status, and Chinese master’s students would be more likely to feel grateful, hopeful and excited, while contemptuous, bored and angry were the least reported. This study also identified a set of emotion-regulation strategies (i.e. task-related regulation, response regulation, cognitive regulation, attention deployment, co-regulation, and general response) used by students in handling their emotions in supervisory feedback situations. This study provides insights into the emotional dimension of supervisory feedback practices and concludes with pedagogical implications to enhance the wellbeing of postgraduate students in learning academic writing.