1. Introduction
Emotions include sets of coordinated psychological processes, including affective, cognitive, physiological, motivational and expressive components [
1]. Emotional experiences are always present and significant; therefore, researchers agree that emotions play a fundamental role in the learning process, affecting student motivation and performance [
2,
3,
4,
5]. For example, students may be excited while studying, hope for success, be proud of their achievements, be surprised to discover a new solution, be anxious about failing tests, be ashamed of poor grades or be bored during lessons [
4]. In addition, the UNESCO, in Pekrun’s words, established that the emotional health of students should be recognized as an important educational goal in itself [
6]. Therefore, teachers need to know and deal with the emotions that students experience in school [
4].
For most students, positive emotions will be beneficial and negative emotions will be detrimental to academic learning [
7]. On the one hand, learning experiences that stimulate positive emotions because they are fun and stimulating help students to have feelings of flexibility, attention, physical health and higher performance [
8,
9]. On the other hand, teachers who use monotonous teaching styles or create learning environments with excessive student failure will promote negative emotions such as boredom [
10], anxiety and anger [
11]. These negative emotions were associated with harm to student attention, reduction in interest and the promotion of superficial levels of learning and motivation [
8]. In conclusion, increasing positive emotions and reducing negative emotions is crucial for all teachers in any subject [
2,
4,
12]. Creating environments and tasks in which students can choose between different options, making time limits more flexible or giving them second opportunities have proven to be good strategies [
13]. For example, students will enjoy learning if they feel competent to meet the demands of the learning task and value the learning material. On the contrary, if they feel incompetent, or are not interested in the material, learning is not enjoyable. In this case, the excessive difficulty of the task generates anger and anxiety, or the lack of intrinsic incentive value causes boredom [
13]. Therefore, there is a clear relationship between emotions and motivation [
14,
15]. The self-determination theory (SDT) [
16,
17] postulates that motivation is influenced by three basic psychological needs (BPNs), which are innate and universal in all people. Autonomy refers to the feeling of being the origin of one’s actions, competence refers to feeling effective in the actions performed and relatedness refers to feeling significantly connected to others [
16]. In recent years, novelty has been proposed as a possible fourth BPN (e.g., [
18,
19,
20]) and has been defined as the need to experience something that has not been experienced before or that differs from a person´s daily routine [
18]. Experiences that satisfy BPNs generate positive emotions and psychological well-being which are related to intrinsic motivation; on the contrary, frustration generates negative emotions and demotivation [
21,
22].
As Simonton stated [
23], physical education (PE) should not be defined by a particular curriculum or teaching style, but rather by the ability to emotionally impact students. The importance of emotions in PE has garnered attention in recent years from various perspectives (e.g., [
12,
24]). Some of the topics studied so far have included the role of emotions in engagement and participation during classes and even in leisure-time [
25,
26,
27]. Other research has focused on the feeling of students in various specific situations, such as learning new motor skills [
28], taking a shower in school [
29] or being picked in the last round for a team [
30]. A large number of studies take into account some emotions or related aspects (e.g., [
30,
31,
32,
33,
34]), highlighting the importance of positive emotions in facilitating learning [
35,
36]. The relationship between BPNs and emotions has been shown in PE, demonstrating that autonomy support helps to generate positive emotions and control tends to generate negative emotions (e.g., [
12,
15,
37]). Emotions can provide a window into an understanding of students’ experiences and behaviors in PE [
11]. For example, happiness unleashes creativity and the desire to play [
4]. In spite of this importance, there is disagreement when researchers want to measure emotions, which is due to the lack of validated instruments. So far, most studies have used a more global approach by measuring the affect (positive and negative) (e.g., [
38,
39]). This means that they do not take into account various discrete emotions [
40], and it limits the capacity to relate emotions to specific behaviors [
23,
40,
41], which may be problematic [
11]. Recently, Trigueros et al. [
24] have proposed an instrument to measure specific emotions created by a Delphi method based on a review of existing instruments. Nevertheless, the results obtained are difficult to compare since they are not based on any specific theory.
Few educational theories focus on student emotions in PE, in spite of their importance [
11]. In recent years, the use of the control-value theory of achievement emotions (CVTAE) in PE has been proposed [
11,
23,
42,
43,
44]. Achievement emotions can be defined as emotions that are tied directly to achievement activities (e.g., studying) or achievement outcomes (success and failure) [
13]. Therefore, the CVTAE offers a taxonomy in the academic field based on a social cognitive perspective [
2]. Specifically, the CVTAE organizes emotions in three dimensions, based on the control and value appraisals: valence (positive or negative), activity level (activating or deactivating) and object focus (activity or outcome) (
Table 1). It is important to note that CVTAE does not mean that achievement emotions are always mediated by conscious evaluations, but these can be automated with repetition [
13].
This theory allowed the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) [
45] to be developed. This questionnaire split a large number of emotions into four quadrants based on the criteria mentioned above (
Table 1): (A) positive and activating emotions, namely enjoyment, hope and pride; (B) positive and deactivating emotions, namely relief; (C) negative and activating emotions, namely anger, anxiety and shame; (D) negative and deactivating emotions, namely hopelessness and boredom. The original version had 231 items which focused on three contexts: class attendance, learning and test taking. This first version has resulted in different, shorter versions, focusing attention on the most well-founded emotions to date. Moreover, the AEQ has been adapted for various subjects (e.g., mathematics [
46,
47], language (AEQ-L) [
48], physics [
49]) and has been translated into many languages (e.g., Chinese [
46], Argentine Spanish [
50], Korean [
51]).
Recently, Simonton [
11] has proposed exploring achievement emotions in PE, creating a coherent review of the use of this theory in PE. At the practical level, it has produced promising results [
23,
44]; however, these studies have two main problems when used to measure emotions. They have focused only on certain specific emotions [
42,
43,
52] or they have used the class-related subscales without adapting them to PE [
23,
44]. Nonetheless, the usual situations in PE are different from those in the classroom. PE is characterized by being eminently practical; despite this, a recent qualitative study found that students tend to express emotions similar to those collected by the AEQ [
12]. Simonton [
11] highlights the importance of addressing the construction of instruments to measure emotions in PE. For these reasons, based on the satisfactory results obtained in other subjects by AEQ and the preview results obtained in PE, the aim of this study was to adapt and validate the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire for Physical Education (AEQ-PE). In addition, to contribute to its external validity, a secondary objective of studying the relationship between BPNs and the emotions measured by the AEQ-PE was established. This must be a first step, which will help to provide information about the set of emotions and understand the behaviors of students in PE [
11].
4. Discussion
The aim of this study was to adapt and validate the AEQ to the context of Spanish PE classes for secondary school students. To this end, to normalize the scales for practical application [
7], due to the peculiarity of PE, the original AEQ [
45] needed to be adapted. For this adaptation, the AEQ-PA [
47] was selected for several reasons. First, this scale focuses on a specific subject (mathematics) in adolescent students. Second, the AEQ-PA measures the six emotions that were shown to be the most important (enjoyment, pride, anger, anxiety, hopelessness and boredom), covering the three main quadrants of the CVTAE [
2]. With this in mind the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire for Physical Education (AEQ-PE) was created, including only the versions of questions referring to the "in-class" context, which is better suited to the nature of PE. The psychometric properties of the AEQ-PE have been examined using various tests, such as exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, assessment of internal consistency, temporal stability and regression analysis.
Due to changes from the adaptation of the questionnaire to physical education and the lack of exploratory studies, an exploratory analysis was made. The results showed the existence of one factor for each emotion, which was confirmed by confirmatory analysis. Factor loadings were high and fit indices were good in both cases [
59,
60,
61]. These results support the model of the emotions being differentiated, discrete and separately probeable [
49]. Therefore, separation into discrete emotions is a better model than models with a single factor or with positive and negative emotions [
7,
47,
49]. For the internal consistency, Cronbach’s alpha was accepted, as was temporal stability [
64]. Positive emotions (enjoyment and pride) were highly positively related to each other and negatively related to negative emotions (boredom, hopelessness, anger, anxiety; in this order from highest to lowest correlation), all of these correlations being highly significant. The pattern of relationships between emotions is similar to those found in previous studies [
7,
47,
49,
50].
Based on the fact that the satisfaction of the BPNs generates positive emotions and their frustration generates negative emotions [
21,
22], a regression analysis was performed in which the BPNs acted as predictors of achievement emotions to provide external evidence. The results showed high percentages of explained variance, which were higher in positive emotions (enjoyment 51% and pride 46%) than in negative emotions (boredom 35%, hopelessness 34%, anger 18% and anxiety 16%). The strong relationship between both variables in PE has been shown recently, but not the predictive power [
15], as it previously was in general learning [
22]. Specifically, the psychological needs that gave greater regression weight were competence and novelty in both the positive and negative emotions. The analysis of the regression weights suggests how specific strategies to generate positive emotions and avoid the generation of negative emotions during the physical education class may be established. In this case, as in previous studies, anxiety was the emotion that was least correlated with the other emotions and had lower regression weights, because anxiety has complex effects on students [
49]. Despite this, all the correlations were statistically significant, and the explained variances were considerable.
The results of the present study provide psychometric support for the AEQ-PE. Nevertheless, some limitations need to be considered. First, this study was carried out with a convenience sample of Spanish pre-adolescents in PE; in the future, other similar groups of students should be examined. Second, the level of measurement invariance has not been studied. For that reason, future research should take this into account when considering that the instrument validation is a continuous process. Similarily, it is recommended that future research continues to study the relationship between the BPNs and other motivational variables with emotions, as well as to find strategies to generate positive emotions and avoid negative emotions in PE. These strategies should be in harmony with the satisfaction of the BPNs as proposed by Deci and Ryan [
21]; however, this needs more attention [
15].