Socio-emotional interaction in collaborative learning: Combining individual emotional experiences and group-level emotion regulation

This study explores how groups' negative socio-emotional interactions and related emotion regulation during a collaborative physics task are interconnected with 12-year-old primary school students' (N = 37) situated individual emotional experiences. To accomplish this, the study relates group-level video data analysis with students' self-reported emotional experiences. The results indicate that students' negative emotional experiences related to the task prior to collaborative working increase the group's emotion regulation during the collaboration and that negative group interactions negatively affect students' emotional experiences after the task. The study also shows that even though group-level regulation is more likely to change the valence of the group's interaction from negative to positive, regulation does not always succeed in making a difference to the students' overall emotional experiences.