Emotional regulation in collaborative learning: when do higher education students activate group level regulation in the face of challenges?

This study focuses on emotion regulation in the challenging situation of collaborative learning. The aim is to explore what type of challenges trigger group-level emotion regulation and what kind of co- and socially shared emotion regulation strategies emerge in relation to these challenges. The participants are 62 higher education students, who collaborated in groups during a six-week mathematics course. The data consist of 87 h of video-recorded learning sessions. In the analysis, first, the challenges emerging during collaborative learning were located. Second, co- and socially shared emotion regulation activated in the face of challenges were traced and the related emotion regulation strategies were classified. The results provide evidence about the collaborative groups’ emotion regulation, highlighting that group-level emotion regulation can be activated in relation to different types of challenges. The results also revealed four different types of strategies which the group members used to manifest emotion regulation.