computation problems that follow the general patterns students have previ-
ously seen in math, positive affect may be beneficial in that students can ac-
tivate the basic script for solving the problem (Bless, 2000) and it may be
easier for students to access basic number facts to aid in solving the prob-
lems (Fiedler, 2000). Furthermore, the use of basic scripts should reduce the
cognitive load making it easier for students to complete a series of numbers
in the sequence or solve multi-digit computation problems in working mem-
ory. A positive mood may not, however, be beneficial when the number pat-
tern does not follow the basic pattern that matches the activated schema or
when a computation problem is unfamiliar. In this case, the student may
take longer to solve the pattern because she must first try the pattern or so-
lution suggested by the schema and then try other patterns when this one
was not successful.
The relation of negative affect to mathematics learning and performance
should also vary depending on the type of task involved. For instance, we
would expect negative affect to be beneficial for detail-oriented tasks, as neg-
ative affect should focus students on the appropriate aspects of the task. That
is, both Fiedler (2000) and Bless (2000) suggested that negative affect should
focus students on the details of a particular task or situation and Fiedler fur-
ther noted that negative affect is beneficial for processing new stimuli.
In terms of mathematics, we would expect that negative affect might be
particularly beneficial for computation problems, in which students must fo-
cus on the details of processing each aspect of the problem. For instance, a
student in a negative mood may be more successful on unusual, atypical
number patterns as he will begin by focusing on the details of the pattern and
may easily detect the pattern based on this focus. This notion is not clearly
supported by the empirical data; however, the findings also do not clearly re-
fute this idea. That is, Bryan and his colleagues (Bryan & Bryan, 1991;
Yasutake & Bryan, 1995) did not examine how negative mood conditions re-
lated to computation, and Linnenbrink and Pintrich (2003, study 1) found no
significant relation between negative affect and performance on number se-
quences. One possibility is that while negative affect may focus students on
the details, there is a cost to this focus that may be detrimental for overall per-
formance. That is, a focus on details may overwhelm working memory as
suggested by Ellis and Ashbrook (1988). Indeed, in a study conducted with
college students, we found that negative affect was associated with lower lev-
els of working memory functioning (Linnenbrink, Ryan, & Pintrich, 1999).
Negative affect should be detrimental for tasks such as problem solving
and shape discrimination in that a focus on details may distract students from
the broader perspective. While this idea is supported in terms of shape dis-
crimination (Masters et al., 1979), it is not supported by Isen et al.’s (1987)
study on problem solving in which the negative and neutral mood conditions
did not significantly differ. For graphing, a focus on details may be beneficial
80 LINNENBRINK AND PINTRICH