Children's and adults' beliefs about the impact of emotional intensity on cognitive performance

In popular culture, positive emotions are often portrayed as performance enhancing (e.g., "happy students learn better"). However, the relationship between emotions and performance is not always straightforward. For instance, when positive emotions become too intense, they can harm cognitive performance. Do people's lay theories of emotions capture this complex relationship between emotions and performance? If so, how early in development do children grasp this nuanced relationship? In three preregistered experiments, we explored children's and adults' beliefs about the impact of different emotional states on attention in school. In Study 1a, we found that 5- to 7-year-old Canadian children (N = 90) and North American adults (N = 55) strongly predicted that happy characters would be better at paying attention in school compared to sad characters, but only adults predicted better attention for a mildly happy character compared to a very happy one. Study 1b (N = 60) shows that adults' intuitions about intense positive emotions as suboptimal for attentional tasks apply equally to child and adult characters. In Study 2, we found that children (N = 80) perceive that the effect of intensity depends on the emotion's valence-it compounds the adverse effects of sadness and amplifies the benefits of happiness. Conversely, adults (N = 80) believe strong emotions, regardless of their valence, are not ideal for paying attention in school. Together, our findings show a developing appreciation of the impact of emotional intensity on cognitive performance-an important aspect of children's emotion understanding with likely implications for self-regulated learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).