Emotions play a central role in learning and academic success (Pekrun, 2024). Pleasant emotions such as excitement and enjoyment can enhance motivation, focus, and persistence. On the other hand, unpleasant emotions such as frustration, anxiety, or boredom, if left unmanaged, can undermine engagement and achievement, and even have longer-term impacts on health and wellbeing. Being able to effectively regulate emotions—such as by reducing unhelpful feelings and maintaining those that support learning—is therefore a crucial skill. Successful emotion regulation helps students to stay engaged with challenging tasks, recover from setbacks, and maintain the motivation needed for independent study. While emotion regulation has been widely studied in traditional, face-to-face higher education, much less is known about how students manage their emotions in online environments. In particular, we know little about how online students make use of digital technologies to manage their emotional states – a phenomenon referred to as digital emotion regulation (Wadley et al, 2020). This is what our paper set out to explore.
