Publications by authors named "Sonia Zaccoletti"
Introduction: Across four countries (Canada, USA, UK, and Italy), we explored the effects of persuasive messages on intended and actual preventive actions related to COVID-19, and the role of emotions as a potential mechanism for explaining these effects.
Methods: One thousand seventy-eight participants first reported their level of concern and emotions about COVID-19 and then received a positive persuasive text, negative persuasive text, or no text. After reading, participants reported their emotions about the pandemic and their willingness to take preventive action.
Article Synopsis
- The study explores how emotional factors like worry impact text comprehension among seventh graders, specifically focusing on the interplay of worry, physiological self-regulation (measured by heart rate variability), and working memory.
- In high-worry situations, students with better physiological self-regulation (higher HRV) performed better in comprehension tasks, while the opposite was true in low-worry scenarios, suggesting a complex relationship.
- Overall, the research highlights the significance of managing anxiety and physiological responses to enhance learning outcomes.
In this study we examined whether parents' perceptions of students' anxiety as well as perceived support from both teachers and classmates were predictive of changes in students' academic motivation during the first wave of COVID-19. To this end, we used a retrospective pretest-posttest design together with a latent change score model to analyze our data. From April to May of 2020, 394 Portuguese parents of students in grades 1-9 participated in this study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: To be successful, students must learn to deal with socially and cognitively demanding tasks. Much remains unknown about the effects of previous classroom experiences and of students' emotional appraisal of a task on their physiological adaptive responses to it.
Aims: To investigate how children's physiological response to a social and cognitive task would be directly and interactively influenced by the perceived student-teacher relationship and by children's emotional appraisal of what reaction they expect to have while completing the task.
Article Synopsis
- The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected education, leading to decreased academic motivation among students in Italy and Portugal due to home confinement and school closures.
- A study involving 567 parents revealed that Italian students experienced a more pronounced decline in motivation compared to Portuguese students, linking this decrease to reduced participation in extracurricular activities.
- The findings suggest that older students showed less decline in motivation, while no significant impact was noted based on gender or parental education, highlighting the need for teachers to implement strategies to boost student motivation during challenging times.
The interplay of reading-related emotions and updating in reading comprehension performance.
Br J Educ Psychol
September 2020
Background: Reading comprehension can be considered the main learning activity. All learning experiences are infused with emotions; however, to date, few studies have focused on the role of emotional aspects in reading comprehension performance. The impact of emotions on academic achievement is thought to be mediated or moderated by cognitive aspects.
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