Our individual order of things directs how we think we feel

ABSTRACT

Our work draws upon Foucault’s idea that the order of things, defined as the way we categorise our world, matters for how we think about the world and ourselves. Specifically, and drawing upon Pekrun’s control-value theory, we focus on the question of whether the way we individually order our world into categories influences how we think about our typically experienced emotions related to these categories. To investigate this phenomenon, we used a globally accessible example, namely, the categorisation of knowledge based on school subjects. In a longitudinal sample of high school students (grades 9–11), we found that judging academic domains as similar led to judging typical emotions related to those domains as more similar than experienced in real life (assessed via real-time assessment of emotions). Our study thus shows that the order of things matters in how we think we feel with respect to those things.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• experience sampling
• Foucault
• similarity judgements
• achievement

Acknowledgement

We thank V. Morger for help with the conceptualisation of the field study-design and establishing contact to the participating schools.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A random slope model was estimated to test the robustness of the results, which indicated variance in the slope (mean = 0.032, p <.001; variance = 0.014, p < .001) and intercept (mean = 3.204, p < .001; variance = 0.112, p < .001) of the effect of the school-subject similarity on the similarity of typically experienced emotions, controlling for all other predictors in the model. The prediction results were largely unchanged when allowing for the slopes to vary across individuals. Specifically, the following effects on typically experienced emotions were found: b = 0.03, p < .001 (ß = .04, p < .001) for the school-subject similarity; b = 0.26, p < .001 (ß = .18, p < .001) for similarity of real-time emotions; b = 0.11, p < .001 (ß = .06, p < .001) for the similarity of academic achievement.

2 First, the similarity of academic achievement across school subjects positively predicted the similarity of reports on typically experienced emotions (b = .13; ß = .07, p < .001). Second, students’ reports on typically experienced emotions were more similar across school subjects for pride, anxiety, and shame than for enjoyment. This finding is in line with results from previous studies (e.g., Goetz et al., 2006, 2007). Moreover, students reported more similar typical emotions in the school-subject pair Math-English than in Math-German.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) [project “Structure and Antecedents of Academic Emotions: Longitudinal Analyses on Habitual and State Emotions Across and Within School Domains”; project grant number 100014_131713/1] and supported by a Research Chair grant awarded to Reinhard Pekrun from the University of Munich (VII.1-H172.10).