Exploring doctoral students’ emotions in feedback on academic writing: a critical incident perspective

Informed by the analytical framework of academic emotions (Pekrun, R., and L. Linnenbrink-Garcia. 2012. "Academic Emotions and Student Engagement." In The Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, edited by S. L. Christenson, A. L. Reschly, and C. Wylie, 259–282. New York: Springer) and a cognitive approach to feedback, this study reported on 16 doctoral students' emotions and emotion-regulation strategies in academic writing situations. A Critical Incident Technique and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from the participants. The findings revealed that across the 65 occurrences of discrete emotions, negative emotions were the most reported emotional status, such as anxiety, confusion, and frustration. However, participants also experienced positive emotions such as satisfaction, inspiration, and gratitude. This study also identified four major categories of emotion-regulation strategies (i.e. task-related regulation, cognitive change, co-regulation, and attention deployment) with 13 specific strategies used by doctoral students in taming and soothing their emotions in feedback situations. The findings provide insights into the emotional dimension of feedback on academic writing and offer implications for both the supervisors and doctoral students concerning how to alleviate the negative emotions and enhance positive emotions by updating their mindset and practice in giving and processing feedback.