Exploring the Complex Role of Emotions in Student Motivation, Performance, and Well-Being

Welcome to this week's episode of Psychology in the Classroom. I'm your host, Lucinda Paul. Today's episode is the second in our series recorded ahead of the British Psychological Society's Psychology of Education Sections Conference, where today's guest is a keynote speaker. Think of this as your exclusive sneak peek into what promises to be a truly fascinating talk. My guest today is Professor Ryan Hyde Pekroon, and as we will hear, he is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex and a Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Positive Psychology in Education at the Australian Catholic University. Ryan Hyde is widely regarded as a pioneer of research on emotions in education and is the originator of the control/value theory of achievement emotions, a groundbreaking framework that has transformed how we understand the role emotions play in learning and academic performance. He is a web of science highly cited researcher with over 400 publications to his name, and has received numerous prestigious awards throughout his career, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the German Psychological Society, and most recently the Shalveson Distinguished Researcher and Lifetime Achievement Award 2025. At the conference, Ryan Hyde will be presenting on how control/value theory is evolving into a dynamic account of self-emotions and emotion regulation, exploring how students and teachers self-appraisals shape their emotional experiences and trajectories over time. So let's dive in. Ryan Hyde, thank you so much for joining me today. I am really excited to talk to you. Could you just start with introducing yourself and telling the listeners a little bit about your background as a psychologist working in the kind of education area? So I'm an educational psychologist and an emotion scientist. My background is primarily in psychology, but I always thought that education is just, I critically important system within society, or the other systems, medicine, or the business world would not exist without education. So my applied field from the beginning was education, and I had my undergraduate studies, my graduate studies, my PhD in Germany, much of that at the University of Munich in Bavaria. But since 2019, I'm not located in England at the University of Essex. I also have a second every year at the Austrian Catholic University in Sydney, and I'm teaching psychology and education psychology, and in research, one of the focus areas is emotions, and that is what we are going to talk about, right? Yeah, absolutely. Great. Well, thank you. So like that leads us nicely into my very first question, then, which is why are emotions so key to academic performance? So this question implies a claim, right? Emotions are key to performance, and I would agree that is really the case. We did not really know that 30, 40 years ago, but we know today that emotions do have a tremendous impact on students learning at performance, and also on teachers classroom instruction and professional development, right? Emotions fuel students engagement with learning, they impact memory processes and the consolidation of memory materials, they change students thinking and cognitive problem solving, they also affect student self-regulation of their learning, and the use of different learning strategies. And we also, I mean, beyond learning and performance should not forget that emotions are clearly important for students psychologically well-being, and also for their physical health. Overall, I would say they're core components of students identity. It was really interesting listening to you talk, because I know that there's been explosion in the mental health and education sector, and one tends to think of it as the poor mental health element, but what you're just saying is just generally our emotions are so closely linked to who we are and what we do and how we function in the day to day life, and that for obviously for teenagers it is largely in school. So my next question is there are loads of emotions, there are good emotions, there are, I don't want to say good and bad, actually that's a really poor way of phrasing it, but there are definitely emotions that probably aid academic progress and ones that hindrate. What are those emotions and how do they fit into the academic landscape? Yeah, that's an excellent question you did already say yourself, it would be just simple to say good and bad, right? This is in fact true. So the answer is not that simple, right? So at first sight one might think and there have been researchers who said that decades ago that positive emotions are beneficial and negative emotions are detrimental and by positive I mean pleasant, like enjoyment, by negative I mean unpleasant, like anger or anxiety, right? And it is true. I mean enjoyment of learning is beneficial for students development and fear of failure for example can often be detrimental, but our research shows and emotional science more generally show it's a bit more complicated and let me explain that for a minute to understand the effects of emotional it is important to consider two features of emotions. First valence and that's what we just talked about positive versus negative or pleasant versus unpleasant, right? Enjoyment being pleasant, fear and anxiety being unpleasant, but there's a second important dimension and that is activation. And by activation we mean physiological arousalm as defined by the interplay of the activation in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. So from that perspective, for example, excitement is activating, anxiety is activating, relaxation is deactivating, boredom is deactivating, which means that both positive and negative emotions can be either activating or deactivating and it is a dimensional issue and it's a matter of more or less, right? So it's not a binary defecation, but still it is possible then to group emotions in a broad way in four categories. Part of activating emotions like enjoyment or hope for success, positive deactivating emotions like relief or relaxation, negative activating emotions, anger, anxiety, a negative deactivating emotions like boredom or hopelessness. And these four groups have different effects on learning. Part of activating emotions like enjoyment of learning, that's the part of typical case, typically have positive effects. So enjoyment focuses you in attention, promotes their interest, their intrinsic motivation, facilitates creative power solving, also makes it easier to self-regulate, right? So typically these emotions are really beneficial, especially when they are directed towards the task at hand, like enjoyment of learning. The exact opposite would be negative deactivating emotions like hopelessness or boredom. So if you take boredom, boredom depletes your cognitive resources, your mind starts wondering, you start daydreaming, you cannot focus your attention anymore on the task, boredom undermines any kind of motivation and just leads to superficial information processing. So that is clearly detrimental then for learning. So it's pretty clear for these two categories, there are exceptions, but overall it's pretty clear. But the other two categories are more complicated. And if you take for example, the negative activating emotion of anxiety, see on the one hand, we know that anxiety can distract attention when you worry about possible failure on an exam, you're not focused on the task anymore, right? And we also know that anxiety can undermine students' interest and their intrinsic motivation to perform tasks. But on the other hand, all of us know that being a little bit nervous before an exam can really motivate us to invest an effort in order to avoid failure. And we know from memory research and research into cognitive power solving that anxiety can also facilitate some types of information processing, especially more detailed oriented growth memorization like types of processing. And then it depends on the demands of the task, overall and the amount of anxiety if it is beneficial or detrimental. So excessive anxiety definitely is detrimental, but anxiety can and there's some conditions also be beneficial, which implies, I mean, it's not good and bad as you said, the world of emotions is not black and white, positive emotions are typically beneficial, negative emotions are often detrimental, but this is not always the case. And I think it is also sometimes just necessary for students to accept that learning is not always enjoyable, learning can be frustrating and tedious. And it's important to understand that this is just normal, right? And that is important to sometimes just accept these unpleasant emotions during learning. It's not always fun, right? I'm going to ask some questions that came up from I guess the interview that I did last week with David Puttwell. And he was talking particularly about exam anxiety and I think it's probably useful to clarify for those people who've listened to that episode. He was talking specifically about exam anxiety and he was saying that, you know, in terms of the context of an exam, that anxiety is never a positive emotion. And I just want to clarify that when you were talking, you were talking about like different contexts. That's presumably a context where anxiety actually has a negative detriment on performance and on learning. It's not even learning in an exam, is it? Whereas anxiety in the classroom might actually be positive in some ways. Have I understood that correctly? Yes, it depends on the situation. It depends on the intensity and the components of anxiety if it is beneficial or detrimental. And typically if exams are important and that is what Dave is talking about and what his research is about, in the average student at least anxiety is detrimental definitely because it takes away attention through worrying and because it undermines intrinsic motivation. So that is certainly true. And the details I mean this will be a discussion between Dave and me, it depends on the context, it depends on the situation. Yeah absolutely and I think that's what I just wanted to clarify that that is one context where it's not necessarily helpful to be anxious but there are lots of contents where anxiety can be beneficial. So I wanted to know whether you think the role of emotions in the classroom is given enough attention either in the research. So one of the papers that I was reading that you'd written was sort of saying that largely emotions is regarded I mean I think it's getting better but also you know when we do teacher training do you think teachers are taught about this stuff? Is it a real problem that perhaps we don't know about it? Yeah for I mean in terms of research for a long time learning was considered a rationalist enterprise and research is focused on cognitive processes, cognitive abilities, the role of intelligence and neglected motivation and even more so neglected humans emotions. But this was so I mean in the 20th century in the first part of the 20th century and then also to an extent the subsequent decades across scientific disciplines. It was so in economics it was so in sociology even humanities like history focused on human actions as rational enterprises right and that has changed dramatically in education research during the past 25 years. So we do have today an affective turn. We have a shared understanding in education research that emotions are important and you can see that just from the number of publications coming out in this field it is literally an explosion in the number of studies on students emotions and also teachers emotions for that matter. But the situation nevertheless is still dire in our countries it is generally dire and that is an issue for policymakers funding for educational research and for science more broadly is on a downward trajectory in many Western countries including England also including other American countries including other European countries and especially relative to what is happening right now in East Asia and China for example they are investing their valuing education their valuing research and they are investing so much more money today. So there's differential development and my call for policymakers is to change that. So overall scientific research including education research is definitely underfunded so we would need more researches more in-depth studies also including studies on students and teachers emotions than we have today. So positive development specifically for emotions but the overall landscape is not looking good if you look into the budgets of funding agencies the ERC and so on you see what is what's going on that it's not promising right now at all. So we are at a competitive disadvantage this way relative to our East Asian colleagues. The work that you do I mean obviously it's fascinating we're gonna come onto it in a second but do you think that the teachers on the ground are actually able to access this kind of research and understand it and then implement it in their work on the day-to-day teaching. Yeah I think so because I mean teacher training has changed as a broad uptake today of research on motivation and emotions you can see that from textbooks you can see that from the contents of programs from the curricular in terms of then translation into classroom practices we do not exactly know that all right we would need representative studies of classroom practices to know more but there are definitely positive developments on that front as well so if I take the keyword social emotional learning social emotional learning programs have been implemented in the United States across states within the US but also in countries around the world and also in England primarily so in primary schools but also in secondary schools in 2007 England launched the SEAL program secondary social and emotional aspects of learning primarily implemented in primary schools right and from there there has been a widespread development in England or in the United Kingdom more broadly to attend to emotional issues in the classroom so there is reason to believe that this is no longer something totally neglected right that's good news so let's talk a little bit about your theory so your theory is control value theory which and I'm really hoping that I've answered this correctly links emotions to students engagement self-regulation and academic performance so for those teachers who have not come across your theory for could you just explain in a little bit more detail what exactly the control value theory is yeah so it's a theory of human emotions more generally but most of the research related to the theory was in the classroom and about the emotions experienced by students and by teachers it is a theory explaining the origins of emotions the effects of emotions and also ways how we can regulate our emotions and it consists of five interrelated models and I think we do not have the time to go into all the details but let me just mention the key point so the first model is about the individual origins of emotions and this is the key part of the theory and the basic premise is it is not simply the situation we are in that prompts our emotions it's our interpretation of the situation that makes it emotionally meaningful the technical term is a prasal it's our prasals that cause our emotions so for example if you receive the B on an exam you can interpret this mark as a success right but you can also interpret it as a failure if you aspire to more than a B and if you interpret the B as success you may feel proud if you interpret it as a failure you may feel disappointed and so a prasals are key to understanding emotions in a given situation and controversy you propose that two of these different prasals that humans process are especially important for our emotions and especially so in an academic context and that's perceptions of control and competence to perform activities and attain positive outcomes and perceptions of the value of these activities and outcome and this is why the theory is called control value theory right so for example if you think competent to master some learning material and if you are at the same time also interested in the material so there is competence and there is value then learning will be enjoyable right if you fear you are not able to master the material or if you're just disinterested learning is not going to be enjoyable so it's about perceived control slash competence right and value or talking about anxiety again you may be afraid of failing an exam if you're not in control subjectively of your performance on the exam which implies that you might fail right from your perspective and if the exam is important if you aren't percent sure you're going to succeed anyways or if you just don't care there's no reason to panic right and we have rich evidence from field studies for experimental studies confirming these claims about perceptions of control and value so that's the first model the second model and maybe we talk about the classroom practice a bit later is about social origins and the impact of classroom instruction so this key role of reprisals has implications also for the role of instruction and social environments all factors in the environment that shape students perceptions of control and value are also influenced their emotions so that's practically important number three is the effects of emotions we literally talk a bit about that writes a control of your theory explains how emotions impact behavior learning and performance and the basic proposition here is and there's a shared understanding that this is true emotions do not directly change learning and achievement they do so by influencing the very psychological mechanisms that underlie achievement and for students learning and achievement four groups of mechanisms are especially important the first one would be working memory and attention emotionally crude resources of our working memory they can distract attention they can focus attention on the task right the second one is motivation emotions from strong motivation to either engage or to avoid engagement the third one is thinking and cognitive power and solving generally positive emotions promote a holistic inflexible way of thinking their promote creativity negative emotions in more detailed oriented rigid way of thinking and then finally emotions impact student self-regulation and their use of learning strategies and positive emotions typically promotes self-regulation negative emotions rather undermines self-regulation and then it's about the interplay or these different mechanisms and they're interplay with tasks demands if effects are positive and negative which is talked about that so for example we had a study with university students of mathematics in which these students were either asked to transfer themselves in an enjoyable state by remembering autobiographical events that were positive and enjoyable or in an actual state of mind but remembering a situation that made them more fearful and those who were in an enjoyable state were better than the others in generating mathematical ideas about a given geometrical problem and but those who were in an anxious state of mind were better in critically evaluating a list of generated ideas for the exact same geometrical problem which which shows I mean it really then depends on on the task demands of emotions in a given situation on a given problem beneficial or detrimental so that that's number three model number four is specifically effects the theory proposes that appraisals and social environments influence our emotions and emotions affect our learning our achievement but this is not a one way street the theory also explains that achievement then reciprocately influences our emotions and our environment success and failure at learning shapes you and the emotional development right which means emotions the origins the effects are linked by reciprocal effects over time it's not a unit or actual emotions have an impact a way of causation only and then the final model is about emotion regulation it follows from the theory that we have different possibilities to manage our emotions including negative emotions including excessive emotions and one imporant in an academic context they to regulate our emotions is developing competence so studying is a primary way for students to experience positive emotions and prevent negative emotions so the very simple message and there are other I mean possibilities to regulate emotions as well but this primary regulatory passability in an achievement context has been neglected in a past research on emotion regulation and controversy proposes that this is really a primary way in an academic context that was very comprehensive and actually really really interesting so lots of questions right the first question I've got when I think you've answered this but I still think there's some picking a bit generally it sounds like this a very dynamic model so if you are an individual in the middle of this model so you're the learner you know your emotions might fluctuate but you can self-regulate if you have the right tools and it depends on the context and how much you're in control however quite often we talk about people having traits and I'm wondering whether there are some people who just are naturally more anxious and therefore that plays into this or perhaps they're naturally more optimistic and therefore they are emotionally going to be more successful is there any kind of stability or does it really just very massively? Both is true so academic emotions and human emotions generally do have a stable component but they're also fluctuating so students do have emotional dispositions that makes them more prone to experience specific emotions like anxiety right more frequently at more intensely than that is the case in other students right and as you said I mean we call these emotions trader motions and that is dispositions that's propensities right but the emotions that students and faculty experience in class are doing exams fluctuate according to the situation so both is true there's a person component and there's a situational component and we call these momentary emotions state emotions right so to an extent there is stability but there's also really situation variability and it then depends to an extent really on what teachers are doing and what classmates are doing what parents are doing if these dispositions play out or not are to what extent they play out so assumed who is dispositionally anxious to an extent need not be anxious in each and every situation in the class depending on contextual conditions right if the atmosphere focuses on mastery and learning de-focuses from competition de-focuses from the fed of exams then a student who has a high disposition to respond with anxiety need not be anxious in the classroom right so both components play role but there's also another aspect that is important to understand for teachers and also for parents so to quite an extent emotions do not only fluctuate over time across situations but they are also dependent on the academic domain on the academic subject at school so the previously thought and by via I mean us researchers that an emotional like test anxiety behaves like a personality trait that is generalized across domains so students are either test anxious or not but today we know better so student self-confidence and their interests differ across subjects and therefore their emotions differ as well they are students who enjoy mathematics but do not at all enjoy the languages and vice versa they also students who enjoy both mathematics and the languages have their students who do not enjoy school at all similarly some students are math anxious others are fed of language classes right we cannot infer from students anxiety in one subject that the students is anxious in other subjects also which means overall we need to attend both to the situational variability of emotions and to their variability across academic subjects and it does not make sense to label students as this for example this is an anxious student does not make sense because of this subject specificity to main specificity of students emotions so fascinating so you have mentioned teachers a number of times and their emotional state I think the next key question is how does the teachers emotional state impact pupils yeah that is an important question because here's our conceptions in the past for different so in my home country Germany for example is was accepted especially from math teachers and science teachers that they were emotionally neutral during classroom instruction focus on the subject matter right but today we know that teachers own emotions doing instruction has such a strong impact on students emotions and then therefore also on students engagement and students learning and there are two channels that are important here so teachers emotions signal value if a teacher is enthusiastic about a math problem dealt with in class right then students can infer that math problems can be interesting so that's one channel signaling value but the other channel is even more important beyond signaling value emotions can be directly transmitted to students emotions are contagious they lead to immediate mimicry of the emotion of our interaction partner and that's an automatic process right meaning if a teacher displays enthusiasm this can spark enthusiasm in students and we do have evidence it shows how students enjoyment then is transmitted to students on condition obviously that the teacher displays their enthusiasm so it needs to be visible but that then can really create a positive atmosphere in class if a teacher is anxious themselves and this has been investigated in research by Baylock in the US primary school teachers being anxious of mathematics this anxiety of mathematics then also was transferred to the teacher's students the teachers pupils right so there is a direct direct channel linking teachers and students emotions and then here as well it is important to consider it's not a one-way street so students emotions also impact us teachers so if students enjoy class and participate right then teaching is much more enjoyable so it's a two-way street so that old adage of don't smile till Christmas which I think a lot of teachers will be going back into the new school year with that in their mind is actually we should really just ignore I think the next question I want to ask really which I think you sort of touched upon in your response there was this idea that it's going back to that idea of value how do we get students to value the things that we're teaching I think there's always that kind of quote isn't there that why do I need to learn this I can just google it how can we as teachers reshape students believe in the value of what they're learning in our classrooms yeah that's the practically important question right and to an extent we did already talk about it but it's a bottom a set of practices that are important and I would like to add so perceptions of the value of learning and materials that's one important facet the other important facet is perceptions of competence right self-beliefs, incompetence, self-confidence, if you will, and then the emotions that follow from these perceptions of value and of competence. And for classrooms and for what teachers are doing, let me just talk about six important groups of factors and ways that teachers can influence students valuing and students' emotions. The first one is the cognitive quality of instructions. So if instruction is clear, the materials are well-structured, then that gives students a sense that they can be competent, that they can develop competence, and that the material is valuable, and that is also then a way to reduce the anxiety. In contrast, if there is a lack of transparency, for example, of task demands, if there is a lack of transparency in the demands of exams, then students' anxiety can be exacerbated. And in my home state in Germany, the barrier, they still have today a surprise exam, so students do not know what is going to happen. They can be confronted with an exam at each and every lesson. They do not know that, and that obviously is a way to increase their anxiety, which is really not recommendable. So the cognitive quality instruction, obviously, is important to increase the quality of learning, but it is also important to increase students' self-confidence and their interests. The second one, we just talked about that as emotional quality, the transmission of emotions from teachers to students, which presupposes to display positive emotions about the topic and about teaching this class of students. So that's a direct way of increasing value and positive emotions. The third one is motivational quality. If a teacher is able to fulfill students' needs for autonomy and their needs for relatedness, that also is a primary way to increase perceptions of value. And autonomy can mean, for example, giving students, depending on their competencies and their age, the discretion to choose between tasks and relatedness then is about any kinds of letting learning occur in groups, in teams rather than just only in the class as a whole or as individual learning. But it is also possible to directly instruct students about value. So letting students reflect about the importance of learning material such as, let's say, mathematics for their calm life, buying a bike and how that does that play out in terms of one's personal budget as a 15 or 16 year old. And for their future life can be pretty successful in increasing their perceptions of value for the mains that at first side seem to be boring. This has been done systematically by intervention researchers. It's called utility value intervention and it can be used by teachers. Number four would be goals structures in the classroom and teachers expectations, also parents expectations. If what researchers call performance goals and that is goals to outperform other students, p-value in the classroom then that is creating a competitive atmosphere that reducing for many students and the chances to be successful relative to others, right? We use control. It increases the importance to avoid failure and competitive atmosphere. So that's an increase of value but it's an increase of negative value of the type of value that we do not want to see and therefore then exacerbates anxiety in many students. Mastery goals focusing on learning and task mastery are more beneficial. And similarly if expectations are too high, if there's too much of an achievement pressure, then the negative value of failure is exacerbated and anxiety is the outcome. So that's about goals structures. Then critically important is feedback on achievement. We know that success typically strikes a part of emotions and failure increases negative emotions and it is important to define success and failure in a way that students do not interact with them as an indicator for ability versus lack of ability but use them as information for next steps in learning. So an error culture that makes it possible to consider mistakes and errors as opportunities to learn rather than indicators for lack of ability that is really also one important way to go. And then it's about the consequences of performance and feedback and that's more an issue for educational administrators and policy makers if educational opportunities and future occupational opportunities are made contingent on marks then the importance of examples increase and that's another factor that increases students test anxiety. So my message would be and I know that Dave is sharing this perspective. It is important to avoid high stakes testing in education wherever possible right and teachers cannot do much about that and single schools it's really a message to educational policy makers and they are there a few more but maybe we leave it at these five four four now. I think there's so much what's really fascinating is the complexity of the classroom and I think as teachers we know this and I think that a lot of people who have never been in a classroom teaching really don't understand how complex and emotionally charged a classroom can be and all of the things that going on inside it. I love the fact that you've linked it so nicely to David's interview that we did last week so if lessons haven't heard that they should definitely go and listen to that but also I did a mini series a little while ago about failure and error climate so again that's linked really nicely with all the research that came out of that so it I would point this into that as well. Unfortunately we are out of time pretty much I've got a couple of just a wrap up questions and I think the first one would be what is the one key thing that you would want teachers to take away from your research? One key thing and I just can only repeat what we talked about is attending to the emotions that occur in the classroom and also out of the classroom in a family environment related to academic learning and academic achievement just attending to emotions I think that is clearly important for students engagement they're learning their performance their well-being and also we didn't talked about that their physical health so emotions are really impacting students' physical well-being and physical health and I could add I mean it is also important for you as a teacher to attend to your own emotions they do not only influence your students they are pretty important to prevent burnout and maintain enthusiasm about being a teacher. Yeah absolutely and then finally just out of interest is there one myth or misconception about education that you'd like to put teachers right on? Yeah one misconception we talked about is positive emotions are always beneficial negative emotions are always detrimental right it is just not that simple. So I think it is important for teachers to understand the the many fault world of emotions a bit better the other outcome of the research we are doing and that extends a bit beyond emotions. One important myth about education is that we should teach students in groups of similar ability and the keyword is tracking right and then we should allocate students to special classes for gifted students for example and we know from our research that tracking does in fact not promote student achievement it reduces student achievement overall on the level of whole countries and we know from our research on emotions that gifted classes can reduce student self-confidence increase the anxiety because if you're surrounded by high ability peers your chances to succeed relative to these peers are reduced so we call this the happy fish little pond effect you may be more happy being surrounded by just an average ability peers than being surrounded by future Nobel Prize winners. Yeah completely get that yeah the happy fish little pond effect yeah great thank you so much I mean there's so much in that and as you said we we could talk about this I think for much longer if someone is listening and they thought oh I'm really interested I'd like to go and find out more is there somewhere they can go are there any particular books or research papers that they should read is there a thing else that you can share? I mean it is always possible to approach me just via email and then we do have websites where information about our research is available. We have written a book for teachers and emotions at school at school is the title. It is a little bit it's not just very recent it was 2017 but it was written specifically for teachers and most of what is in that little volume is really still up to date and another piece that I can recommend is we collaborated with the International Bureau of Education in Geneva and UNESCO and I offered a piece on emotions and learning that is available on the Internet from this IBE and UNESCO series about education practices and that's a very short summarizing the most important points, very short overview that is available there on the internet. So we'll put all of the links to those things into the show notes, so if listeners want to go and have a look at anything, that's where they should have a look and the links will be there. All right, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been really, really fascinating. What an incredibly rich conversation that was a huge thank you to Professor Reinhard Pecgrun for joining me today and making such a complex research, it feels so accessible and relevant to what we do in the classrooms every day. So let's just recap some of the key takeaways from today's episode. First, emotions are not simply good or bad, it is far more nuanced than that. While positive, activating emotions like enjoyment, generally support learning and negative deactivating emotions like boredom tend to hinder it, emotions like anxiety sit in a much more complicated middle ground. Context and intensity really matter. Second, teachers' emotions are contagious. If you bring in three years into your classroom, that genuinely transfers to your students. So perhaps it's time to finally retire that don't smile to Christmas advice for good. Third, the control value theory reminds us that students need to feel both competent and that the work they're doing is valuable. As teachers, we have real power to shape those perceptions through the quality of our instructions, the feedback we give and the classroom culture that we create. Fourth, labeling a student as an anxious student is an oversimplification. Consumptions are domain-specific, a student might be anxious and mass, but thrive in English. It's worth keeping that in mind before we put students into boxes. And finally, tracking students' viability is not the answer. The big fish little pond effect is a powerful reminder that surrounding students with peers of mixed ability can actually support their confidence in emotional well-being, far more than placing them in high ability groups where they may struggle to feel successful. As always, the links to your hand-hards work, including the book Emotions at School and the UNESCO IBEPs on Emotions and Learning are in the show notes. You do go and have a look. If you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to follow the podcast on your listening platform and sign up to the newsletter over on the website so that new episodes land directly in your inbox every week and you won't have to remember to check back. I'll do all of that work for you. Next week, I'll be talking to Amy Sayer about her brand new book How to Build a Mini-Full Mental Health Curriculum, a practical guide for schools. So if today's conversation has got you thinking about the emotional lives of your students, next week's episode is going to be the perfect follow-on, so make sure that you don't miss it. So until then, take care of yourselves and as a Reinhardt reminded us today, that includes attending to your own Emotions too. So until then, goodbye. Thanks for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I've been your host, Lucinda Paul, and before you go, I just need to share a few important things with you. Firstly, my thanks to the British Psychological Society for their continued support of this podcast as part of the BPS teacher toolkit. Do take a look. There are some really great resources there. But without this support, I simply wouldn't be able to do the podcast. This podcast is provided for free, and all we ask is that you spread the word. So if you found this useful, please do share the link with colleagues or via social media. You can also follow the podcast on whichever listening platform you use, which will help others to find it. Finally, if you would like to know when each podcast is released and what it is about, call it over to my website, changing states of mind.com, and sign up to my mailing list. So until next time, goodbye.