The Effects of Gamification on Students' Emotions: A Controlled Experimental Study

One of the primary objectives of gamified education is to promote students' behavior change to provide a positive learning experience. Most studies, however, focus exclusively on studying how students experience the systems, ignoring the emotions generated by sensory information. To fill this lack, we conducted a between-subjects controlled experiment (N = 62) to analyze the effects of gamification on students' basic emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust). Based on descriptive and inferential statistical techniques, we compared the students' basic emotions between participants who used a gamified version of a learning management system (experimental group) and a group that used the system with identical educational tasks without gamification (control group). The primary results reveal that anger was the most frequently observed emotion in both system versions, whereas scare was the least expressed emotion in both versions. No significant differences in emotions between groups were registered. We contribute especially to the fields of educational technologies and gamification with insights into the effects of gamification on students' basic emotions.