Reviewing the work of Educational Psychology in 2017 gave me much satisfaction and pleasure in collecting high-quality academic papers to contribute to the literature on various topics. Our elite Editorial Board members, 142 Consulting Editors plus about 200 expert Reviewers from 29 countries and economies have offered invaluable support to Educational Psychology in garnering 76 papers in the 10 issues of the last volume. These selections helped push up the Impact Factor of the journal from 1.157 in 2015 to 1.310 in 2016, and the five-year Impact Factor in 2016 has also increased healthily from 1.511 to 1.515. This encouraging news provides concrete evidence that the journal is becoming more influential in the field of educational psychology. I would like to thank the editorial team, the reviewers and the authors of all submissions for their professionalism and for dedicating their valuable time to the growth of this journal.
One direction of growth is that educators are now looking beyond academic achievements to focusing on students’ well-being, which refers to ‘how much positive emotion, how much engagement at work, and how much meaning in life our citizens have’ (Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich, & Linkins, Citation2009, p. 308). Seligman et al. (Citation2009) summarised it well:
The time has come for a new prosperity, a prosperity that combines well-being with wealth. Learning to value and to attain this new prosperity must start early – in the formative years of schooling – and it is this new prosperity, kindled by Positive Education, that the world can now choose. (Seligman et al., Citation2009, p. 308)
The learning environment is an emotional place as affective states, both pleasant and unpleasant, can play a role in teaching and learning (Schutz & Pekrun, Citation2007). In the current issue of the journal, Shafaei, Ngu, and Alrashidi (Citation2018) worked on students’ emotions by developing a model of psychological well-being among international students from six public universities in Malaysia. They found that life satisfaction, depression and self-esteem are significantly related to psychological well-being, and that the mediation effect of these three aspects of an individual’s psychological adaptation support the relationship between attitude adjustment and psychological well-being. Burkitt (Citation2018) investigated emotions from an interesting angle by comparing the concordance between child reports and adult observations of single and mixed emotions in children’s drawings. The author concluded that children can report their mixed emotions through drawings of themselves or other children, and that adults accurately judged both the mixed and the single drawing strategies as reported by the children. Interested in understanding how regulation strategies moderate the impact of stress on the emotional states of students in tests, Sang, Pan, Deng, and Zhao (Citation2018) reported that Chinese adolescents experienced decreasing positive emotional states and increasing negative emotional states as the examination period approached. When the examination was finished, adolescents who used more up-regulation in a negative event were more negatively emotional. In terms of emotional changes in daily academic studies among students, in a study of a group of Spanish nursing undergraduates who were facing academic burnout, García-Izquierdo, Rios-Risquez, Carrillo-Garcia, and Sabuco-Tebar (Citation2018) showed that the effect of emotional exhaustion on students’ psychological health was moderated by the characteristic of psychological resilience. This finding is useful in guiding the university in designing better training strategies for nurses to be.
The above studies show that today’s students are facing many emotional issues. The authors of another three papers in this issue share their ideas in relating emotions and support. Working with a sample of German adolescents, Raufelder, Regner, and Wood (Citation2018) identified a positive association between emotionality and school helplessness, and a negative association between worry and school helplessness. Students’ perception of their teachers as a positive motivation was found to moderate emotionality and learned helplessness, but the perception was not a buffer between the two factors. Diseth, Breidablik, and Meland’s (Citation2018) longitudinal study demonstrated that as time points of the experiment progressed, the effect of autonomy support and basic need satisfaction was stationary. Causation also existed between the two variables and a reciprocal causal effect from basic need satisfaction to autonomy support. Liu et al. (Citation2018) looked into the more concrete support from teachers and reached the conclusion that teacher support directly and significantly impacted the cognitive, behavioural and emotional aspects of students’ mathematics engagement, with academic self-efficacy and enjoyment mediating the relationship.
These illustrative papers are our recommendations for the study of emotion and support in the educational context. In the upcoming issues in this volume of Educational Psychology, more current researches will be published to enlighten the audience with relevant studies in educational psychology. Apart from our regular issues, the journal is going to roll out two special issues that muster articles in the hot areas of technology-based intelligent learning environments and civic education for alienated, disaffected and disadvantaged students. Educational Psychology will continue to make great efforts to achieve excellence, and I am confident that the journal’s diversified collection will suit the needs and tastes of our stakeholders.
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References
- Burkitt ,E. (2018). Assessing the concordance between child reports and adult observations of single and mixed emotion in children’s drawings of themselves or another child. Educational Psychology, 38 (1), 75–98.
- Diseth ,A., Breidablik ,H.-J., & Meland ,E. (2018). Longitudinal relations between perceived autonomy support and basic need satisfaction in two student cohorts. Educational Psychology, 38 (1), 99–115.
- García-Izquierdo ,M., Rios-Risquez ,M., Carrillo-Garcia ,C., & Sabuco-Tebar ,E. A. (2018). The moderating role of resilience in the relationship between academic burnout and the perception of psychological health in nursing students. Educational Psychology, 38 (1), i–xiii.
- Liu, R., Nyroos, M., Jonsson, B., Liu, Y., Wang, J., Jiang, R., & Xu, L. (2018). Teacher support and math engagement: Roles of academic self-efficacy and positive emotions. Educational Psychology, 38(1), 3–16.
- Raufelder, D., Regner, N., & Wood, M. A. (2018). Test anxiety and learned helplessness is moderated by student perceptions of teacher motivational support. Educational Psychology, 38(1), 54–74.
- Sang, B., Pan, T., Deng, X., & Zhao, X. (2018). Be cool with academic stress: The association between emotional states and regulatory strategies among Chinese adolescents. Educational Psychology, 38(1), 38–53.
- Schutz, P. A. & Pekrun, R. (Eds.). (2007). Emotion in Education. Burlington, MA: Academic Press.
- Seligman, M. E. P., Ernst, R. M., Gillham, J., Reivich, K., & Linkins, M. (2009). Positive education: Positive psychology and classroom interventions. Oxford Review of Education, 35(3), 293–311.10.1080/03054980902934563
- Shafaei, A., Ngu, B. H., & Alrashidi, O. (2018). A model of psychological well-being among international students. Educational Psychology, 38(1), 17–37.