Achievement emotions in elementary, middle, and high school: how do students feel about specific contexts in terms of settings and subject-domains?

The present work investigates students' representation of achievement emotions, focusing in context-specific situations in terms of settings and subject-domains, as a function of grade level. We involved 527 fourth-, seventh-, and eleventh-graders, who evaluated ten discrete emotions through questionnaires, with reference to verbal language and mathematics, and different settings (class, homework, tests). Confirmatory multitrait-multimethod analyses indicated higher salience of subject-domains rather than settings for all the emotions; however, complexity of reality was best explained when also settings were accounted for.