Emotions in Mathematics Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Academic emotions play a crucial role in mathematics learning, significantly influencing motivation, academic achievement, and career aspirations in mathematics. With the notable increase in research on emotions in recent years, our review uses Pekrun’s control-value theory with two primary objectives: to systematically describe the characteristics of emotions in recent research through a systematic review, and to synthesize evidence on the relationships between specific emotions, control-value antecedents, and mathematics achievement via a meta-analysis. The systematic review of 112 studies revealed that more than 100 specific emotions have been addressed in recent research, which we analyzed based on key emotion characteristics: valence and activation, type of object, temporal stability, and social context. The findings from the systematic review provide an overview of mathematics-specific objects that emotions have referred to in the most recent research. The subsequent meta-analysis demonstrated that mathematics achievement (e.g., test scores and grades) was positively related to enjoyment, hope, and pride (r̅ = .247, .224, and .344, respectively) but negatively related to anger, boredom, frustration, hopelessness, and shame (r̅ = .322, .187, .207, -.378, and -.291, respectively). Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.