Emotions, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Emotion Regulation for Academic Writing: A Collective Case Study with Doctoral Students

Abstract

Dealing with feedback, managing uncertainty regarding writing expectations, and juggling multiple demands are all part of making progress with academic writing. Emotion regulation can enable an academic writer to manage these emotion-related experiences and contribute to writing productivity. A writing group might be particularly beneficial to provide emotion regulation support from others through interpersonal emotion regulation. The purpose of this research was to understand the emotion experiences of doctoral student writers while engaged in academic writing in a social context, the ways in which graduate students experience emotions related to their academic writing, how interpersonal emotion regulation is enacted in social writing contexts, and which intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies support academic writing productivity. To investigate these experiences, in the current collective case study research, four doctoral student writers were led individually through meme elicitation during an initial interview to explore their previous emotion experiences in academic writing. Subsequent multi-participant writing group sessions were offered online and video recorded to document the ways in which the participants and the group facilitator (the researcher) provided interpersonal emotion regulation in that context. During and after each writing group session, participants were invited to complete a brief questionnaire about their emotions and their experiences in the group. Final individual interviews provided participants the opportunity to recount their emotion experiences while writing in the group context. Findings indicate that these doctoral student writers experienced a wide variety of emotions in relation to their academic writing. Participants reported a desire to feel positive, activating emotions while they were engaged in academic writing. These same emotions, including happiness, contentment, and engagement, for example, were reported when they were most satisfied with their writing progress after a writing group session. These doctoral student writers used a variety of interpersonal emotion regulation techniques to support each other, most frequently empathic concern and validation. Participants found emotions to be an important factor in writing motivation. They reported using strategies such as breaking the task into smaller pieces, working for shorter time periods, and compartmentalizing their tasks when they were feeling unmotivated to write.