most of these tasks differ in a number of ways from the types of tasks used in
academic contexts.
The other theories reviewed here also tend to rely on tasks that are fairly
far removed from typical academic contexts. For instance, in addition to the
emphasis on social psychological paradigms, Bower (1981), Ellis and Ash-
brook (1988), Fiedler (2000), and Forgas (2000a) all relied, at least in part, on
research involving the recall of word lists under different experimentally in-
duced mood conditions. These examples of the types of tasks and the con-
texts for the experiments suggest that there may be some difficulty in apply-
ing the research conducted in social psychology settings to students’ learning
in school. First, most of the studies were conducted in laboratories and may
not necessarily translate to unstructured classroom contexts. Second, most of
the studies were conducted with college students and may not account for de-
velopmental differences. Third, and most importantly, the tasks are fairly dif-
ferent from the tasks that students are typically asked to complete in aca-
demic settings. For instance, while students may be asked to read persuasive
arguments or to recall a story or even to recall word lists in some classrooms,
the school tasks are typically much longer in duration than the social psy-
chology tasks. In addition the learning, instruction, and assessment sessions
often occur over the course of several weeks rather than the typical 30–60
minute psychology experiment session. Finally, the academic tasks are often
focused on content domains where students will have at least some familiarity
with and some relevant prior content knowledge.
Unfortunately, few educational psychologists have attempted to apply
these affect and cognitive processing theories based on the social psychologi-
cal research to typical classrooms. Aside from test anxiety, the relationship
between affect (moods and emotions) and cognitive processing for academic
tasks has been largely neglected (Pekrun et al., 2002). Accordingly, in our at-
tempt to suggest implications for classroom learning, we focus on some pre-
liminary work conducted in our laboratory regarding the relation between af-
fect and cognitive processing on two types of tasks: (a) conceptual change in
science understanding and (b) mathematics. For each type of task, we then
review relevant research linking affect and cognitive processing in these two
domains. Finally, we analyze this research based on the social psychological
models discussed previously.
In describing our work, we focus on affect more generally and do not dif-
ferentiate between moods and emotions. This decision was made because the
measures were taken to assess affect during the task, suggesting that emo-
tions were measured rather than mood because there was a specific referent;
however, our measures assessed general valence (positive/negative) and not
specific emotions making it difficult for us to talk about these in terms of spe-
cific emotions. In terms of arousal, some of our measures assessed both low
- AFFECT AND COGNITIVE PROCESSING 67