Measuring emotions during epistemic activities: the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales

ABSTRACT

Measurement instruments assessing multiple emotions during epistemic activities are largely lacking. We describe the construction and validation of the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales, which measure surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration, and boredom occurring during epistemic cognitive activities. The instrument was tested in a multinational study of emotions during learning from conflicting texts (N = 438 university students from the United States, Canada, and Germany). The findings document the reliability, internal validity, and external validity of the instrument. A seven-factor model best fit the data, suggesting that epistemically-related emotions should be conceptualised in terms of discrete emotion categories, and the scales showed metric invariance across the North American and German samples. Furthermore, emotion scores changed over time as a function of conflicting task information and related significantly to perceived task value and use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic emotion
• surprise
• curiosity
• confusion
• value appraisal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There were no gender differences in mean emotions scores (long version of the EES) except for enjoyment, Ms = 4.92 and 5.45, SDs = 2.04 and 2.25, for female and male students, respectively; d = −.025, t = −2.04, p = .042,

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Munich [grant number VII.1-H172.10], by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number SSHRC 410-2011-0182], and by a Visiting Fellowship Award from the Center for Advanced Study, University of Munich, awarded to Krista Muis.