Experiencing mixed emotions, a combination of two oppositely-valenced emotions, has been shown to reduce bias in decision making and improve the accuracy of judgements made. However, most previous...

This study enriches the literature on entrepreneurial decisions by investigating the antecedents of the synergetic use of causal and effectual logic. Based on entrepreneurial metacognition and emotional complexity theories, we argued that the emotional complexity of an entrepreneur, referred to as the granular experience of, or variety in, experienced emotions during the entrepreneurial task, would contribute to the synergetic use of decision logic. With survey data gathered from 218 Chinese entrepreneurs, we found that entrepreneurs with higher emotional complexity are more (...) likely to adopt two types of entrepreneurial logic in tandem, and cognitive flexibility mediates this positive relationship. Thereby, this study helps to unravel some of the complexities behind the choice of decision logic of entrepreneurs. (shrink)

Examining the nature of teachers’ emotions and how they are managed and regulated in the act of teaching is crucial to assess the quality of teachers’ instruction. Despite the essential role emotions play in teachers’ lives and instruction, research on teachers’ emotions has not paid much attention on teachers’ emotions in the context of daily teaching. This paper explored elementary teachers’ emotions while preparing for teaching and during teaching mathematics, reasons that underlie these emotions, and the relationship between their emotions (...) and the quality of their mathematics instruction. Participants were seven elementary teachers working in the U.S. who participated in Holistic Individualized Coaching (HIC) professional development that consisted of five cycles of coaching over an year. For each coaching cycle, pre-coaching conversation and post-coaching conversation data were collected regarding emotions teachers felt in anticipation of teaching and during teaching retrospectively. In order to compare teachers’ emotions with instructional quality, coaching sessions were video recorded and analyzed to determine the quality of instruction. Findings of this study showed that teachers reported six categories of emotions (positive, negative, neutral, blended-positive, blended-negative, and mixed), described emotions often in non-typical ways (e.g., “not nervous”, “anxious but in a positive way”), and experienced mixed emotions (co-occcurence of positive and negative emotions) as the most dominant emotion. Teachers also had more positive emotions anticipating teaching than actually teaching the lesson. The reason teachers felt mixed emotions reflected the complex and context-specific nature of teaching, a phenonemenon not currently described in the teacher emotion literature. There were no clear relationships between emotional experiences and instructional quality. This study allowed participants to freely describe their authentic, complex, overlapping, and ambiguous emotions in the context of active teaching, which contributes opening up the possibilities of diversifying teacher emotion research and shows the significance and usefulness of understanding teachers’ emotions related to active instruction. (shrink)

The concept of transformative experience (TE) has been widely explored by several disciplines from philosophy to neurobiology, and in different domains, from the spiritual to the educational one. This attitude has engendered heterogeneous models to explain this phenomenon. However, a consistent and clear understanding of this construct remains elusive. The aim of this work is to provide an initial comprehensive interdisciplinary, cross-domain, up-to-date, and integrated overview on the concept of TEs. Firstly, all the models and theories on TEs were reviewed (...) to extract and analyze TEs’ main components emerging from different disciplines. Then, this preliminary analysis was integrated with an in-depth examination of redundancies and particularities across domains and disciplines, to provide an integrated theoretical framework of TEs and a preliminary interdisciplinary operational definition of TEs. This examination, in turn, can help organize current research and theories, thus providing suggestions for operationalizing TEs as well as encouraging new interdisciplinary research endeavors. (shrink)

Emotional complexity means diversity, universality, and differentiation of individual emotions. This research consisted of two studies to demonstrate the constitution of the emotional complexity. In Study 1, the participants were asked to use 10 emotional words to record the variation of emotions over 30 days in daily life. In Study 2, the experimental materials were enriched. The participants were required to note the emotions with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule in a 3-day holiday—all the individuals in the two studies (...) needed to record the most important emotional event. As a result, the youth experienced complex emotions every day. Emotional complexity indicators included covariation index, component index, granularity index, and variability index. A four-factor model reflected a good model fit, with ????2/df = 0.33, CFI = 1.00, TLI = 1.03, RMSEA = 0.000, SRMR = 0.003, including positive differentiation, covariation of positive affect and negative affect, negative differentiation, and emotional variation. These indicators may reflect the complex experiences in everyday life. The results shed light on the emotional experience that can change greatly within 1 day and on episodes of emotional disruption resulting from an important event coupled with excessive excitement or extreme tension. (shrink)