How University Lecturers’ Display of Emotion Affects Students’ Emotions, Failure Attributions, and Behavioral Tendencies in Germany, Russia, and the United States

Abstract

In this study, we investigate whether the cultural-educational contexts in Russia, Germany, and the United States affect university students’ emotions, failure attributions, and behavioral tendencies after receiving negative achievement feedback from a lecturer. The 383 university students from Germany, Russia, and the United States participating in the study completed an online survey in which they read text vignettes of a university lecturer giving negative feedback to a student on his performance. We used a 2 × 3 × 3 experimental design to determine whether the negative feedback situation (private vs. public), the lecturer’s display of emotion (no emotion vs. anger vs. pity), and the cultural-educational contexts (German, Russian, U.S.) affected the participants’ judgment of the student’s affective and behavioral reactions to the negative feedback. Significant main effects and significant interactions were identified, for example, participants in Germany and in the United States reported stronger emotions in response to the negative feedback than the participants in Russia indicated. Also, compared with the participants in Germany and the United States, the participants in Russia attributed the student’s failure more often to external, unstable, and controllable factors and expected the student to adopt more approach tendencies after receiving the failure feedback. Furthermore, a culturally universal effect of emotional transmission between lecturer and student was found, as participants believed the student, for example, to feel anger when his lecturer displayed anger. Overall, the interplay of cultural-educational and situational contexts can affect the way students respond to the emotions a university lecturer displays, and those emotions can shape students’ learning behavior.