Managing Exam-Related Emotions: The Impact of Emotion Beliefs and Coping

Objective: University students experience disproportionately high rates of mental health problems, potentially due to academic stress. This study examined patterns of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) during a 10-day exam anticipation period and explored their associations with coping strategies and emotion beliefs.Methods: A sample of 137 students completed ecological momentary assessments (EMA) of PA and NA across 10 days. Psychological distress, coping styles, and implicit theories of emotion (TOE) were assessed via self-report. Latent class growth analysis identified affective trajectories, followed by ANOVAs to examine differences in psychological risk and protective factors across the identified trajectory classes.Results: Four distinct trajectories emerged for both PA and NA, and showed dynamic overlapping patterns. Classes varied mainly by initial levels, with higher NA and lower PA linked to greater psychological distress and more avoidant coping. Lower entity TOE (i.e., viewing emotions as malleable) was only associated with more favourable PA patterns, suggesting a buffering role in emotionally stressful periods. Across patterns, NA trajectories appeared more influential than PA in predicting emotional adjustment: stable or gently increasing NA was consistently linked to lower distress and avoidance, whereas sharp or sustained increases in NA—regardless of PA—were associated with higher distress and avoidance.Conclusion: Moment-to-moment affective dynamics during exam stress reveal meaningful individual differences in emotional vulnerability and resilience. The varied overlap between PA and NA classes indicates that these two affective dimensions operate largely independently, underscoring the value of examining them in parallel. The findings on emotion beliefs and coping strategies point to these psychological factors as promising targets for interventions to support student mental health, specifically with regard to regulating NA.