How music teachers’ emotional expressions shape students’ performance: “C’est le ton qui fait la musique”

Teachers, parents, and other feedback providers commonly express positive emotions to stimulate learning. When students’ performance is below expectations, however, feedback providers may be inclined to express negative emotions. How these different emotional styles shape students’ development remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the effects of music teachers’ positive versus negative emotional expressions on their students’ musical performance. We draw on emotions as social information (EASI) theory, which postulates that the effects of emotional expressions depend on targets’ information-processing motivation (which determines whether feedback is extracted from emotional expressions) and agreeableness (which determines the perceived appropriateness of positive vs. negative expressions). We followed music teachers and students during regular learning sessions. One week before the sessions, we assessed students’ dispositional information-processing motivation and agreeableness. Immediately after the sessions, students reported on their teachers’ emotional expressions during the session, and teachers rated the performance of students on two musical tasks. An outside expert evaluated recordings of a subset of these performances. Consistent with the EASI framework, students who were confronted with stronger positive emotional expressions of their teachers performed better to the extent that they were lower on information-processing motivation and higher on agreeableness. Conversely, students who were confronted with stronger negative emotional expressions performed better to the degree that they were higher on information-processing motivation and lower on agreeableness. These findings indicate that both positive and negative emotional expressions of teachers can benefit students’ performance, depending on the student’s personality. We discuss implications for feedback, emotions and education.