Achievement emotions
Also known as: Control-value theory of achievement emotions
The emotions we feel about learning and performance — pride, anxiety, boredom — depend on how much control and value we perceive.
What it means
Achievement emotions are emotions tied directly to achievement activities and their success or failure outcomes, such as enjoyment of learning, hope, pride, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom. Pekrun's control-value theory holds that these emotions are jointly determined by two appraisals: how much control a person feels over the activity and its outcome, and how much they value it. High control plus high value yields enjoyment; low control plus high value breeds anxiety about an important outcome one can't command; and high control over a valued-but-unchallenging task can produce boredom. The emotions in turn feed back onto attention, motivation, strategy use, and performance, often reciprocally over time. The nuance is that the theory organizes a wide emotional landscape along the same control and value dimensions that drive expectancy-value and attribution accounts. It matters for education because it links how students appraise tasks to which emotions arise and how those emotions shape learning.
How the appraisals map onto emotions
The theory sorts emotions on more than two axes. Object focus splits them: activity emotions attach to the doing, while outcome emotions attach to success or failure, either prospectively as hope, anxiety and hopelessness, or retrospectively as pride, shame and anger. Control and value interact rather than divide the labour: control largely picks which emotion arises once something is valued, but value is not just a volume knob — with control high, value present gives assurance and value absent gives boredom. Where value falls to zero, no achievement emotion arises at all. Activation is the axis practitioners miss most. Anxiety activates and hopelessness deactivates, so two emotions of the same negative valence push in opposite directions: one drives frantic effort, the other withdrawal.
What the evidence shows
The strongest test is the PALMA study, five annual waves following 3,425 German adolescents through grades five to nine. Enjoyment and pride predicted later mathematics achievement, and achievement predicted later enjoyment and pride, controlling for gender, intelligence and socioeconomic status. Anger, anxiety, shame, boredom and hopelessness ran negative in both directions. It is a loop, not a one-way street. A meta-analysis of 68 studies of activity emotions puts the corrected correlations with performance at .27 for enjoyment, minus .25 for boredom and minus .35 for anger: modest and consistent, not dramatic. Frustration came in at minus .02 — but on nine samples against boredom's sixty-six, with a confidence interval spanning zero, so this is an absence of evidence more than a demonstrated null.
How it is measured
The standard instrument is the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire, 24 scales covering enjoyment, hope, pride, relief, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness and boredom across attending class, studying and taking tests. It asks how you usually feel, and that framing is not innocent. When Goetz and colleagues asked both ways, girls reported more habitual mathematics anxiety than boys, but experience sampling during real classes and real tests found no gender difference in the moment; perceived competence partly explained the gap. Habitual reports blend felt experience with beliefs about oneself, so survey emotion data reads better as self-narrative than as a log of what was felt.
Limits and caveats
Much of the evidence base is cross-sectional and self-reported, and appraisal items and emotion items sometimes share enough wording that the correlation between them is partly built in. Longitudinal work helps, but reciprocal causation is hard to prise apart, and experimental manipulation of control and value stays rare next to the volume of survey work. Samples skew Western and school-aged; the theory claims relative universality across genders and cultures, but tests outside that frame are thinner. Effects are moderated in ways that should give pause: stronger in secondary school than primary or college, and stronger when measured with the theory's own mathematics instrument, the AEQ-M.
Using it in practice
Diagnose the appraisal, not the emotion. Anxiety says value is present but control is missing, so cut ambiguity, publish the criteria, and break the work into steps someone can actually command. Boredom is the trap here: it comes from lack of value at either end of control, so check which end you are on before prescribing. Underchallenge wants a harder task; overchallenge wants the task made tractable first. Raising the challenge on someone already overwhelmed deepens the boredom. The everyday framing of boredom as control-without-challenge is close but imprecise: the challenge is missing, but what actually generates the boredom is the activity carrying no intrinsic value of its own. The wrong remedy backfires: pressure applied to a bored person produces anxiety rather than engagement, and reassurance offered to an anxious one strips out stakes they still care about. Hopelessness means both appraisals have collapsed, and the outcome has to be relinked to effort before anything else works. Because the loop is reciprocal, engineering an early success is often the cheapest way in.
Examples
A student who values an exam but feels she can't control the outcome is consumed by anxiety, while one who values and feels in command of the material enjoys studying.
A bookkeeper who cares about getting the monthly reconciliation right, and could do it in her sleep, feels no pride by the third hour — only boredom, the signature of control without challenge.
A nurse six months in dreaded every shift: the ward mattered and she was sure she would make a mistake. Same ward, same stakes, but now she is competent, and she looks forward to going.
A salesperson short of quota by a hair works the phones past midnight; the one whose territory has gone dead and who is short by half stops dialling altogether. Same negative outcome and the same bad feeling in the room, but anxiety still has control worth fighting for while hopelessness has surrendered it, and only relinking effort to outcome gets the second one picking up the phone again.
An engineer on call knows the runbook cold and a quiet shift asks nothing of him — the hours themselves carry nothing he wants, and he is bored even though uptime matters. A novel outage he cares about but cannot diagnose flips the same shift into dread.
First described in Reinhard Pekrun (2006).
Key references
- Pekrun, R. (2024). Control-value theory: From achievement emotion to a general theory of human emotions. Educational Psychology Review, 36(3), Article 83. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09909-7
- Camacho-Morles, J., Slemp, G. R., Pekrun, R., Loderer, K., Hou, H., & Oades, L. G. (2021). Activity achievement emotions and academic performance: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 33(3), 1051-1095. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09585-3
- Pekrun, R., Lichtenfeld, S., Marsh, H. W., Murayama, K., & Goetz, T. (2017). Achievement emotions and academic performance: Longitudinal models of reciprocal effects. Child Development, 88(5), 1653-1670. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12704
- Goetz, T., Bieg, M., Ludtke, O., Pekrun, R., & Hall, N. C. (2013). Do girls really experience more anxiety in mathematics? Psychological Science, 24(10), 2079-2087. doi.org/10.1177/0956797613486989
- Pekrun, R., Goetz, T., Frenzel, A. C., Barchfeld, P., & Perry, R. P. (2011). Measuring emotions in students' learning and performance: The Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ). Contemporary Educational Psychology, 36(1), 36-48. doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2010.10.002
- Pekrun, R. (2006). The control-value theory of achievement emotions: Assumptions, corollaries, and implications for educational research and practice. Educational Psychology Review, 18(4), 315-341. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-006-9029-9