Confronted with mathematics: the impact of pre-service elementary school teachers’ self-concept on emotional and physiological responses to mathematics exposure

This study employed a situated approach to evaluate how female pre-service elementary school teachers’ mathematics self-concept impacts their emotional and physiological responses when confronted with mathematics tasks. We assessed participants’ (N = 70, M age = 20.6 years) self-concept before inviting them into the laboratory, where they solved arithmetic pattern tasks. We recorded their psychophysiological arousal via skin conductance response (SCR), heart rate (HR), and heart rate variability (HRV), and assessed their situated emotional experience using self-report during task performance. We hypothesized linear associations between self-concept and subjective emotional valence (more pleasant with higher self-concept), and curvilinear associations between self-concept and psychophysiological arousal (higher arousal with both low and high self-concept). As predicted, higher self-concept was associated with elevated pleasant and reduced unpleasant emotional experience, even when controlling for task performance. For SCR, we found evidence for the proposed curvilinear relationship between self-concept and physiological arousal, while HR was unrelated to self-concept, and HRV showed a predominantly negative linear relationship with self-concept. Our findings imply pleasant engagement (positive emotion, high arousal) when mathematics self-concept is high and aversive disengagement (negative emotion, dampened arousal) when mathematics self-concept is low during a relatively low-stakes mathematics task exposure. Our findings highlight the predictive role of self-concept for situated emotional experiences and imply that university teacher education should provide emotionally pleasant, success-promising situations for pre-service elementary school teachers to (re-)build a healthy mathematics self-concept to thrive as students, and later, become effective educators.