Emotion malleability beliefs predict daily positive and negative affect in adolescents.

ABSTRACTThe present study examined the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and daily positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in adolescents. 639 participants provided information about emotion malleability beliefs and emotion regulation strategies on the first day of the study and six daily measurements of PA and NA. Emotion malleability beliefs had a positive relationship with PA and a negative relationship with NA. Higher emotion malleability beliefs predicted lower carryover effects of PA and NA across assessment days. We also found that cognitive reappraisal might affect the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and daily affect, such that those who held high levels of malleability beliefs were more likely to engage in cognitive reappraisal and report lower NA and higher PA. The findings of the present study suggest that emotion malleability beliefs could predicate daily emotions and emotion dynamics across days in adolescents.

The Role of Opportunity to Learn on Student Mathematics Anxiety, Problem-Solving Performance, and Mathematics Performance.

This study examined the effects of opportunity to learn (OTL) or the content coverage in mathematics on student mathematics anxiety, problem-solving performance, and mathematics performance. The pathways examining the influences of OTL on student problem-solving performance and mathematics performance via mathematics anxiety were also tested. A sample of 1,676 students from Shanghai-China, and a sample of 1,511 students from the United States who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 were used for the analyses. The results from multilevel models and path models supported our hypotheses that OTL not only showed significant direct effects on student mathematics anxiety, problem-solving performance, and mathematics performance, but also presented indirect effects on student problem-solving performance and mathematics performance via mathematics anxiety in both Shanghai-China and United States, controlling for student gender, grade, and socioeconomic status. The practical implications of the current results were also discussed.

The Decomposition of Between and Within Effects in Contextual Models.

In contextual studies, group compositions are often extracted from individual data in the sample, in order to estimate the group compositional effects [e.g., school socioeconomic status (SES) effect] controlling for interindividual differences in multilevel models. As the same variable is used at both group level and individual level, an appropriate decomposition of between and within effects is a key to providing a clearer picture of these organizational and individual processes. The current study developed a new approach with within-group finite population correction (fpc). Its performances were compared with the manifest and latent aggregation approaches in the decomposition of between and within effects. Under a moderate within-group sampling ratio, the between effect estimates from the new approach had a lesser degree of bias and higher observed coverage rates compared with those from the manifest and latent aggregation approaches. A real data application was also used to illustrate the three analysis approaches.