Happy but overconfident: positive affect leads to inaccurate metacomprehension

ABSTRACT

When learning from text, it is important that learners not only comprehend the information provided but also accurately monitor and judge their comprehension, which is known as metacomprehension accuracy. To investigate the role of a learner’s affective state for text comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy, we conducted an experiment with N = 103 university students in whom we induced positive, negative, or neutral affect. Positive affect resulted in poorer text comprehension than neutral affect. Positive affect also led to overconfident predictions, whereas negative and neutral affect were both associated with quite accurate predictions. Independent of affect, postdictions were rather underconfident. The results suggest that positive affect bears processing disadvantages for achieving deep comprehension and adequate prediction accuracy. Given that postdictions were more accurate, practice tests might represent an effective instructional method to help learners in a positive affective state to accurately judge their text comprehension.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• metacomprehension accuracy
• reading
• text comprehension

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Anja Prinz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1097-3442

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Deutschland (the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany) under Grant 01JA1518A.