Emotional Processes in Learning Situations

3Toward Considering Emotional Skills as Academic Skills

Sabine GUERAUD and Louise GOYET

DysCo, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France

In everyday language, emotions are considered to be an intense emotional state that accompanies us throughout our daily lives and is an integral part of our personality. It is also considered that the nature of these emotions is shaped throughout life with the experiences we live. Indeed, humans express and feel emotions, and constantly process them, trying to make sense of them and determine their origin. Everyday, we interact with our fellow human beings and try to decode and understand the emotions produced by others. However, although emotions have been given a central place in developmental and cognitive psychology research, it is only recently that the study of emotions in the academic context has emerged (Cuisinier and Pons 2012). The issue of emotions can be broken down into two main areas. The first concerns students’ emotional feelings (Stegge et al. 1994; Efklides and Petkaki 2005) as well as teachers’ (Hargreaves 2000; Perry et al. 2002; Sutton and Wheatley 2003) and their impact on learning processes (Clavel and Cuisinier 2008; Cuisinier et al. 2010; Fartoukh et al. 2012, 2014; Tornare et al. 2016). A second focuses on emotions as objects of knowledge that the child acquires during development (Cuisinier and Pons 2012). This chapter is part of this second group and aims to provide readers with the current knowledge of the ...