Bio

Reinhard Pekrun is Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, and Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney. His research areas include achievement emotion and motivation, personality development, and psychological assessment and evaluation. Pekrun pioneered research on emotions in achievement settings and originated the Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions. He has published more than 350 books, articles, and chapters, and is listed among the top twenty currently most highly cited researchers in the social sciences. Pekrun is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the American Educational Research Association, and the International Academy of Education. He served as President of the Stress and Anxiety Research Society and Vice-President for Research at the University of Munich. Pekrun received the 2015 John G. Diefenbaker Award from the Canada Council which acknowledges outstanding research accomplishments across fields in the humanities and social sciences. He is also the recipient of the Sylvia Scribner Award 2017 (American Educational Research Association), the EARLI Oeuvre Award 2017 (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction), and the Lifetime Achievement Award 2018 of the German Psychological Society.

Abstract

Control-Value Theory: A Dynamic Approach to Self, Emotions, and Emotion Regulation

Across life domains, self-appraisals are critically important to understand the dynamics of emotions. Appraisals of one's own competencies, behavioral propensities, past developments, and future prospects shape human emotions, their regulation, and their trajectories over time. In this presentation, I will outline how control-value theory (CVT) explains the links between self-appraisals and emotions. More specifically, I will focus on three developments that transform the original theory into a generalized, dynamic account of self and emotions (dynamic CVT). First, in its original version, CVT addressed achievement emotions. Dynamic CVT extends the perspective by also considering other types of emotions that are foundational for human development, such as epistemic emotions (e.g., surprise, curiosity confusion), social emotions (e.g., love, admiration, compassion, hate, contempt, envy), and existential emotions (e.g., hope and fear related to health, life, illness, and death). Second, the original CVT specified relations between self-appraisals, emotions, and their outcomes, but did not define the functional form of these relations and their change over time. Dynamic CVT considers both linear and non-linear dynamics linking self-appraisals and emotions. Third, I will outline how dynamic CVT explains individual and social regulation of emotions. Going beyond traditional accounts of emotion regulation, CVT addresses the role of the self as a target of regulation – developing one's competencies, goals, and behavioral dispositions in affectively sound ways is seen as core to healthy emotion regulation. In conclusion, I will discuss directions for future research and implications for behavioral policy and practice.    

Keywords: Control-value theory, self, appraisal, emotion, emotion regulation