Toward a Further Understanding of Students' Emotional Responses to Classroom Injustice

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Guided by emotional response theory, we examined students' emotional reactions to perceptions of classroom injustice. Undergraduates from three universities participated by completing questionnaires. Students most frequently reported procedural injustice, but experienced the most severe and most negative emotional responses to violations involving interactional justice and a combination of procedural and distributive injustice. Students felt hurt by classroom injustice, perceived it as severe, and reacted with low pleasure, and moderate to high arousal and dominance. Students associated unfairness with low emotional support from instructors and generally low emotion work with instructors. Student perceptions of injustice severity were also associated with stronger student emotional responses to classroom injustice.