should also enhance performance. Therefore, the empirical research suggest-
ing that positive affect enhances shape discrimination (Masters et al., 1979;
Yasutake & Bryan, 1995) lends support to these theories. In addition, consis-
tent with Isen et al.’s (1987) findings, positive affect should enhance problem
solving, particularly creative problem solving in that positive affect should
help students move away from the details of the task and take a broader, per-
haps more creative perspective.
In addition, we would expect that positive affect would enhance the inter-
pretation or reading of graphs. That is, when interpreting graphs, students
are often asked to look at general patterns, a process which should be facili-
tated by positive affect. However, the results from our research (Linnenbrink
& Pintrich, 2003, study 2) suggest the positive affect hinders students’ reading
and interpretation of graphs. This unexpected finding may be because stu-
dents in our study may have needed to use both heuristic and detailed-
processing, as the types of tasks falling under the purview of graphing our
quite broad. However, if this were the case, we would have expected positive
affect to be unrelated to learning, as it might have enhanced learning for
some aspects and hindered it for others.
Another possibility, is that our study assessed affect during a 6-week unit
and looked at learning over 6 weeks while the prior studies and the studies on
which the theories were developed assessed affect during a relatively short du-
ration. Furthermore, we used measures of self-reported affect while prior re-
search has manipulated mood. Thus, while our results regarding the relation
between positive affect and graphing cannot be easily interpreted under the
existing theories, they also differ in a number of ways from prior research
suggesting that a variety of factors may account for the discrepancy. Never-
theless, we should note that our study on mathematics and graphing exam-
ined student learning in real school contexts; thus, in trying to understand
how affect influences learning in school, the results may be quite relevant.
The results for computation and number sequences are also difficult to in-
terpret in terms of the affect and cognitive processing theories, in part, be-
cause the findings are not consistent. In particular, Bryan and Bryan (1991)
reported that positive moods enhanced performance on computation prob-
lems while Yasutake and Bryan (1995) and Linnenbrink and Pintrich (2003,
study 1) found no relation between affect and performance on solving num-
ber sequences. One possible explanation for these discrepancies is the dura-
tion of time spent on the task. Participants in Bryan and Bryan’s (1991) study
had 5 minutes to complete the task while participants in the other two studies
had 15 minutes. While time does differ among these studies, it seems unlikely
that a 10-minute difference could account for the discrepant findings. Based
on the theories presented in this chapter, it also seems plausible that the re-
sults might be mixed or inconsistent. That is, for typical number sequences or
- AFFECT AND COGNITIVE PROCESSING 79