How Students Feel About Their Feelings Varies by Degree, Not by Year

A study of university students in Arequipa, Peru, has found that the way people attend to, understand, and regulate their emotions does not appear to mature as they progress through their degrees, but it does differ meaningfully depending on what they study. The research, published in BMC Psychology by Jol Milton Chirinos and colleagues, examined emotional metacognition, the capacity individuals perceive in themselves to notice emotional experiences, comprehend them clearly, and manage them effectively. Drawing on a theoretical framing the authors describe as enactive emotional cognition, the study asked whether this emotional self-knowledge is shaped by the academic environment students inhabit rather than simply by the passage of time spent in higher education.

Emotional metacognition is typically measured along three dimensions. Attention reflects the degree to which a person notices and thinks about their emotional states. Clarity captures how well they can identify and label those states with precision. Regulation concerns their perceived ability to modify moods and use emotional information productively. Together, these three facets, often assessed with the Trait Meta-Mood Scale, form a picture of how people relate to their own inner emotional lives. High attention without clarity, for example, can be maladaptive, associated with rumination, whereas clarity and regulation are generally linked to better psychological adjustment and more effective coping.

The research team analyzed archival data from 460 second- and fifth-year undergraduates at a private university in Arequipa, collected during the 2008 academic period between January and March of that year. Participants had a mean age of 22.43 years, with a standard deviation of 2.96. Emotional functioning was assessed using the Trait Meta-Mood Scale-24, a condensed 24-item instrument that yields scores for Attention, Clarity, and Regulation. University and vocational experience were measured with an eight-question categorical questionnaire covering aspects of how students perceived their institution and their chosen profession.

The statistical approach was deliberately conservative. The researchers used Pearson’s chi-square tests to examine associations between categorical variables, supplemented by Cramér’s V as a measure of effect size, which indicates the strength of an association independently of sample size. Because some contingency tables contained sparse cells, the team employed Monte Carlo procedures, a computational method that estimates exact significance values through repeated random sampling rather than relying on asymptotic approximations that can be unreliable with small expected frequencies. Crucially, they applied the Benjamini-Hochberg adjustment across 24 item-level comparisons to control the false discovery rate, a correction that reduces the risk that statistically significant findings are merely chance artifacts arising from testing many hypotheses simultaneously.

The results on academic year were strikingly null. There was no association between year of study and Attention, with a chi-square of 0.337 on two degrees of freedom across 449 valid cases, a p-value of .845, and a Cramér’s V of just 0.027. Clarity showed a similarly negligible pattern, with a chi-square of 2.726, p equal to .256, and V of 0.079, and Regulation followed suit with a chi-square of 0.282, p of .868, and V of 0.025. In practical terms, second-year and fifth-year students reported essentially comparable emotional metacognitive profiles, suggesting that the university experience itself, at least as measured by time enrolled, does not systematically reshape how students perceive their emotional abilities.

The picture changed when the researchers looked at academic program. Here, all three dimensions of emotional metacognition showed statistically significant associations. Attention differed across programs with a chi-square of 39.795 on 18 degrees of freedom, p equal to .002, and a Cramér’s V of 0.211. Clarity showed the strongest association, with a chi-square of 54.027, p below .001, and V of 0.248. Regulation also varied significantly, with a chi-square of 46.201, p below .001, and V of 0.227. Faculty-level analyses reinforced this pattern, with all three dimensions associated with faculty membership at p below .001 and effect sizes ranging from 0.160 to 0.203. These are modest effects by conventional standards, but they are consistent and statistically robust.

The most selective finding emerged from the analysis of university experience. After the false discovery rate adjustment was applied, only one association survived: the link between Clarity and students’ willingness to choose the same profession again, which remained significant at a q-value of 0.024. This suggests that students who report a clearer understanding of their own emotions may also report stronger vocational conviction, although the cross-sectional design makes it impossible to determine whether emotional clarity fosters vocational satisfaction, whether satisfied students come to feel more emotionally lucid, or whether both reflect some third factor such as general well-being or personality traits like conscientiousness.

The authors are explicit that causal or developmental interpretations are not warranted by these data. The cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, so differences between academic programs could reflect self-selection, with students of particular emotional profiles gravitating toward particular fields, rather than any effect of the programs themselves. Similarly, the absence of year effects could mean that emotional metacognition is a stable trait-like disposition during early adulthood, or that any developmental change occurring across two or three years is simply too small to detect with this sample size and these categorical methods. The modest effect sizes, ranging roughly from 0.16 to 0.25, indicate that program and faculty account for only a small proportion of the variance in emotional metacognition.

The historical nature of the data adds another important layer of caution. The responses were collected between January and March 2008, within the 2007-2008 academic period, meaning the dataset predates the smartphone-saturated, pandemic-shaped university environment of today. The authors state that the findings should be interpreted as preliminary and context-specific rather than as a description of current Peruvian university students’ experiences. This transparency is notable in a field where archival analyses are sometimes presented with more generalizing ambition than their vintage supports. The ethical documentation also reflects the study’s age: rather than a modern ethics committee approval, the research was authorized by the Rectorate of the Universidad Católica de Santa María in January 2008, following a formal request from the University of Mons-Hainaut in Belgium, and all participants were adults who provided written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki as it applied at the time.

What, then, does the study contribute? Its theoretical framing through enactive emotional cognition positions emotional metacognition not as an isolated internal faculty but as something enacted in the ongoing interaction between a person and their environment. On this reading, it makes sense that students embedded in different disciplinary cultures, with different demands, social norms, and emotional climates, might report somewhat different relationships with their own emotions, while mere chronological progression through the same institution leaves those relationships largely untouched. The selective association between emotional clarity and willingness to rechoose one’s profession hints that understanding one’s feelings may be woven into how students evaluate the paths they have taken. For educators and counselors, the practical implication is modest but concrete: if institutions want to support students’ emotional lives, the disciplinary context, not the academic calendar, may be the more meaningful unit of intervention, and any such efforts should be grounded in fresh data rather than the preliminary, historically bounded evidence this study provides.

Subject of Research: Emotional metacognition and its association with academic program and university experience among Peruvian undergraduates

Article Title: Emotional metacognition and university perception: an interpretation through enactive emotional cognition

Article References: Chirinos, J. M., Laurentz, A. L., Alarcón, V. E., & Rodríguez, M. E. (2026). Emotional metacognition and university perception: an interpretation through enactive emotional cognition. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05734-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05734-5

Keywords: emotional metacognition, TMMS-24, university students, higher education, emotion regulation, emotional clarity, emotional attention, educational psychology, metacognition, Peru, cross-sectional study, enactive cognition