Effects of emotions on children's arithmetic: Insights from a strategy approach

I adopted a strategy approach to examine the role of emotions in children's arithmetic and investigated how this role changes during childhood. Participants estimated sums of two-digit addition problems under emotionally neutral and negative conditions in three experiments (Ns = 127, 148, and 132). The results showed that negative emotions (a) impaired arithmetic performance, especially while solving harder problems and while executing harder strategies, (b) changed how often children used available strategies and how often they selected the better strategy on each problem, (c) did not change how many or what types of strategies children of all age groups used, (d) had similar influence on how often children of all age groups used available strategies and selected the better strategy on each problem, and (e) impaired strategy execution less and less strongly as children grow older. These findings illustrate the usefulness of investigating the role of emotions on children's cognition with a strategy approach. They also have important implications for further our understanding of how emotions influence children's arithmetic performance in particular and cognitive performance in general, as well as how this influence changes during children's development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).