Goal priming and the emotional experience of students with and without attention problems: an application of the...

The primary purpose of the present study is to evaluate the emotional experience of students with (n = 52) and without attention problems (n = 272) during an achievement task. A secondary purpose of the present study is to compare students' emotional response to various stimuli, when motivated by various achievement goals. Participants were randomly assigned into a mastery goal condition, a normative performance goal condition, and a non-normative performance goal condition. Results, using a latent means analysis, indicate that students with attention problems needed additional time to process emotion-loaded but not neutral words, providing evidence for an interference effect. Furthermore, students in the performance-normative, relative to the performance non-normative, condition showed a salient interference effect with respect to various emotion-loaded and neutral words.