Opposite emotional states as a predictor of academic achievement in high school

Abstract

This work has as main objective to analyze the predictors of Anxiety, Happiness and Academic Achievement, according to age, gender, culture and socioeconomic stratum as well as the relationships that could be given between all the variables, for a multicultural adolescent sample. To make it possible we focused on 811 participants from six educational centre; 71.6% of the total were Muslims and 28.4% belonged to the Christian religion, 46.1% were male and 53.9% female. The techniques used in this survey were the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC, Spielberger, 2001), a Happiness questionnaire, as well as the students’ grades. The results reflect that the predictors of Anxiety are Age and Gender. For Happiness, all the sociodemographics variables act as predictors: They are Age, Culture, Socioeconomic stratum and Gender. We found a strong and inverse relationship between Anxiety and Happiness. Each one act as the main predictor of the other. Academic Achievement predictors’ are the sociodemographic factors of status, culture and age. There is no statistically significant relationship between Anxiety and Academic Achievement, but we found it between Academic Achievement and Happiness.