Effect of Students' Emotions on their Positive Psychology: A Study of Higher Education Institutions

A survey was carried out in three cities, namely Mumbai, Pune, and Chandigarh of India. A total of 566 valid survey responses were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated six sets of emotions measurement indicators, namely anger, disgust, happiness, positive emotions, sadness, and fear for measuring students’ emotions.


INTRODUCTION
In cognitive science, the emotions are considered as powerful predictors of an individual's behavior [1,2]. In the literature, emotions are defined differently by different authors. Oatley,Keltner and Jenkins [3] defined emotions as communication between people and people, which comprises behavior, physiological variations, and subjective experience [4] reported emotions as the mental condition of readiness rooted by one's thoughts and external events. However, various factors affect emotions such as perception, environmental factors, physical health, self-awareness, and stress, etc [5]. On there is high diversity in positive and negative emotions among students. Emotions drive attention, which leads to learning and memory [13]. Likewise, emotions influence students' performance through their cognitive resources, motivational practice, and problem-solving ways [14]. According to Phan et al [6], positive emotions facilitate the students in adjustments, making friends, and engaging in proactive social associations with others. Park et al. [15] stressed that the negative emotions, namely boredom, and hopelessness, hinder the learning, whereas positive emotions, namely enjoyment, and happiness, contribute to knowledge. Therefore, the "positive psychology" of an individual plays a vital role in how an individual evaluates his/her circumstance. Positive Psychology can be defined as "the scientific study of optimal functioning" [16]. Hence, positive psychology seeks to identify various skills and strengths of individuals that help them to thrive for the best. In the current research, authors assume positive psychology as a distinct way of inspecting the individual's condition rather than seeing it as a separate entity. Positive psychology works on the assumption that humans will thrive for best, given the right amount of skills, social context, and strengths [17]. Hence, positive psychology is a complex and heterogeneous field, consisting of interventions for promoting resilience, positive emotions, engagement, meaning, curiosity, social connectedness, and many other things [18].
The arguments mentioned above highlight the role of positive emotions among students. In this context, previous studies have made valuable efforts to explore the role of positive emotions. The majority of these studies are conducted in the developed country context. Moreover, scientific, academic literature lacks a survey that can provide a holistic understanding of the emotional indicators of students. Therefore, this study aims to bridge this research mentioned above void by identifying and statistically validating the emotional indicators of students in the Indian higher education sector context, which is considered to be a crucial social sector in the country [19]. This paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 discusses the related prior contributions. The research methods are demonstrated in Section 3. Section 4 reports the analysis and results. Section 5 discusses the conclusions and implications of the study.

HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT
Nowadays, in the scientific literature, the role of emotions in the education sector has attained significant attention among academicians and researchers. In different academic settings, students experience mixed sentiments that manifest their behavior [20,21]. Emotional processes shape learning, thoughts, and behavior, indicating that emotional cognition can be related to students' attitudes towards learning and entrepreneurial activities [22]. The most inclusive theoretical framework demonstrating the imperativeness of emotions in education is the control-value theory of achievement emotions [17,23]. The variations in emotions are crucial predictors of the emotional conflicts that describe depression and unease [24]. The unexpected events demand explanations, and emotions are perceived to be experienced [25]. The emotional ecology concept confronts the traditional polarization of reason and feeling [26]. Researchers reported that persons with negative emotions usually engage in frequent negative thinking and less engaged in positive thinking [21,27].
In addition to this, the literature claimed that anxiety decreases the attention span of students. Thus their emotional condition can have a significant effect on how they perceived the particular information [28]. Baker et al. [29] found that frustration is the common negative emotion during learning and can lead to disengagement with the learning material. Likewise, Taub et al. [30] reported frustration as a significant predictor of cognitive learning. On the other hand, when students achieve particular goals and found solutions to problems, they experience positive feelings such as happiness [27,31,32].
According to Zembylas [33], emotions are important factors that affect the relationships between teachers and students and social structures in the educational sector. Mainhard et al. [34] manifested that how a teacher interpersonally associates with their students mainly depends on the emotions of the student. Few researchers have conducted a comparison between the possibilities to consider the diverse emotion strategies such as expressive suppression versus cognitive reappraisal [10, 35,36]. Peterson,Brown and Jun [37] reported that commonly the favorable emotions are endorsed more strongly than adverse emotions but are weaker at the start of the examination. Kashdan and Ciarrochi [17] classified emotions as per valence, the extent of activation, and object focus. Accordingly, valence reports to negative and positive, activation reports to activating and deactivating, and object reports to output prospective and output retrospective.
Further, Pekrun et al. [38] found a significant positive correlation between perceived control and positive activating emotions and negative relationship between perceived control and negative activating emotions. Lopez and Denny [7] investigated the role of emotions in goal-oriented behavior by formulating a framework for evaluating the emotional goal structure. Further, Pekrun et al. [39] reported a linkage between students' emotions and their academic achievements. On the other hand, during the exam, students feel relief, confident, hopeful, or upset based on how they supposed their progressive performance. Besides, post-exam, positive feelings are more strongly increased than negative [27,40]. Linnenbrink and Pintrich [41] reported that unpleasant emotions could then further affect students' goals.  elaborated that how and why students' emotions appear and how their emotions shape their involvement and accomplishments and how they can optimize the emotional resources for improving their participation and achievements. However, individuals with emotional conflicts are more likely to reduce their emotional experience than individuals with controlled emotions [32]. Cardon et al [43]. discussed the individual and social notion in emotions and highlighted the importance of emotion management. Further, Wharton et al. [44] highlighted that the management of emotion needs energy exertion, and emotional dissonance results in unfavorable psychosomatic outcomes.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Further, a thorough literature review and in-depth discussions with psychology experts were taken as bases to develop the survey questionnaire. The questionnaire was forwarded to six experts. Based on the expert's recommendations, few items were eliminated, and few items were rewritten to enhance the clarity of the questions. The survey responses were recorded using a 5-point Likert scale. In this line, a total of 1500 questionnaires were distributed to the students in universities and colleges studying within three Indian cities, namely Mumbai, Pune, and Chandigarh. However, only 566 valid responses after eliminating the halffilled questionnaire were received in return. This shows the 37.73% survey response rate. Thus, the 37.73% survey response rate can be considered as sufficient for the analysis. Table 1 shows the respondent's characteristics. The table shows that the majority of respondents belong to the male category (61.1%) followed by females (39.9%). As concerned to the age, majority of respondents belong to the age group between 20 and 25 years (80%) followed by less than 20 (11.75), between 26 and 30 (6.4%), between 31 and 35 (1.6%), and more than 35 years (0.2%). From the educational point-ofview, 67.3% of respondents were post-graduate, 26.7% were graduate-undergoing, 5.8% were graduates, and 0.2% were doctoral. Lastly, 6.4% of respondents were working somewhere, and the remaining 96.6% of respondents were nonworking.

Sample Adequacy
The collected data were further analyzed using appropriate statistical tools. In this context, as a first step, the sample adequacy was evaluated considering Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and item's commonalities. The analysis achieved a KMO value of 0.828, which is above the minimum required threshold. In the same vein, In addition, the analysis confirmed Chi-Square (χ2) = 7739.321, degree of freedom (DF) = 406, and significance value (Sig.) = 0.000. Similarly, the item's communalities were evaluated, and 0.5 was considered as the minimum threshold [45]. Accordingly, FE2 was eliminated due to low communality. The other communalities were meeting the minimum suggested thresholds, which provide the support for conducting EFA [45].

Exploratory Factor Analysis
As a next step, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was applied, and an eigenvalue greater than one was considered for factors extraction [46]. EFA extracted six relevant factors cumulatively, explaining the 65.45% variance ( Table 2). After the in-depth evaluation of the statements under each factor, the factors were labeled as anger, disgust, happiness, positive emotions, sadness, and fear, respectively. The first extracted, anger, has an eigenvalue of 4.481, and it explains 15.45% variance. The second factor, disgust, has an eigenvalue of 3.791, and it explains 13.07%. The third factor, happiness, has an eigenvalue of 3.314, and it demonstrates a 10.80% variance. Subsequently, the fourth factor, emotions, has an eigenvalue of 2.876, and it explains 9.91% variance. The fifth factor, sadness, explains 8.93% variance with eigenvalue 2.592. The last extracted factor, fear, explains a 7.26% variance with eigenvalue 2.106 ( Table 2). Table 2 reported items loading under their related construct. The literature suggested that loading for each item should be above 0. 5 [47, 48]. For anger, the factor loadings were between 0.762 and 0.888. For disgust, factor loadings were between 0. 0.735 and 0.862, and between 0.764 and 0.836 for happiness. The factor loadings were between 0.751 and 0.843 for positive emotions, and between 0.727 and 0.811 for sadness. Lastly, for the fear, the factor loadings were between 0.713 and 0.854. This is an indication that all the item's factor loadings are statistically acceptable as these were greater than 0.5. Further, the descriptive and reliability analysis for each extracted factor was performed. Further, to ensure the stability and consistency of the results, Cronbach's alpha was taken into account. Kaiser [49] suggested 0.5 as a minimum alpha threshold. Table 2 shows that the Cronbach alpha value for each construct is above 0.5.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis
Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to validate the six extracted factors. CFA is a tool that is very important and has been used in previous studies very effectively [50 -52]. Fig. (1) reports to the CFA model. The CFA model was used to assess the convergent and discriminant validities. Accordingly, the CMIN/DF, GFI, NFI, TLI, CFI, and RMSEA values were used as benchmarks to evaluate the potency of model fit [45]. The researcher suggested that CMIN/DF should be below 3. The GFI, IFI, TLI, and CFI should be above 0.90, and RMSEA should be below 0.08. The results obtained CMIN/DF equal to 2.32, which is below the recommended value of 3. Likewise, GFI, IFI, TLI, and CFI are above 0.90, and RMSEA is below 0.08. All these values indicate a good model fit [53,54]. Table 3 summarizes to the of CFA model validation. Table  4 shows that analysis obtained CR = 0.843, AVE = 0.519, and MSV = 0.029 for the "emotion". For the "happiness", the analysis obtained CR = 0.856, AVE = 0.545, and MSV = 0.021. Further, "disgust" has CR = 0.876, AVE = 0.587, and MSV = 0.045, and factor "sadness" has CR = 0.834, AVE = 0.503, and MSV = 0.029. Factor, "fear" has CR = 0.814, AVE = 0.525, and MSV = 0.035, and lastly, "anger" has CR = 0.903, AVE = 0.653, and MSV = 0.045. Likewise, the square root of the AVE for the all six constructs is above than their interconstruct correlation.     Table 4 reports the standardized estimate, S.E., C.R., significance level, and R square of each item. In this line, the standardized estimates are between 0.803 and 0.681 for the "happiness", 0.679 and 0.813 for "happiness", 0.667 and 0.848 for "disgust", 0.469 and 0.768 for "sadness", 0.640 and 0.842 for "fear", and between 708 and 0.888 for the "anger".

Structural Model
Herein, the efforts have been made to test the relationship between emotional indicators on positive psychology. The structural model includes seven constructs: "happiness", "positive emotions", "fear", "sadness", "anger", "disgust", and "positive psychology". In the model, "happiness", "positive emotions", "fear", "sadness", "anger", "disgust" are six independent constructs, and "positive psychology" is a dependent construct. AMOS software was used to test the proposed claims, and recommendations of [45] were followed for assessing the potency of research claims. Fig. (2) reports to a structural relationship between the emotional indicators and positive psychology.
The findings of the present study will add to the literature primarily in the Indian context. The previous empirical result has shown that there has been a lot of research on wellbeing in the Indian context [55]. However, very few studies have examined the effect of student's emotions on their positive psychology [56]. The findings of the survey will help educators to understand the importance of student's emotions, and accordingly, different interventions should be given to students depending upon their emotional state. Further, the findings of the current research cannot be compared with the previous studies on positive psychology, which has been mainly conducted in the western context. India is a developing country, and a major chunk of the population in India lives in poverty. Hence, understanding the emotional state of the students becomes more crucial in India as compared to other parts of the world. The Indian students come from a very different cultural background and belong to a unique educational system where many of the resources that are taken for granted in the western world are seen as a luxury in India [57 -59].

CONCLUSION
This paper aims to identify the dimensions of emotional indicators and how these dimensions affect positive psychology. The study findings significantly contribute to building a holistic understanding related to emotional indicators. The results of the EFA classified the scale items into six factors as the dimensions of emotional indicators, namely "anger", "disgust", "happiness", "positive emotions", "sadness", and "fear". Further, extracted factors were validated using the CFA approach. As a next step, the CFA model was evaluated for convergent validity, discriminant validity, and model fit. The results confirmed that the CFA model reached the minimum required value of convergent validity and discriminant validity. The results further confirm "anger", "disgust", "happiness", "positive emotions", The findings conclude that respondents prefer to be too joyful as joy is not followed by sadness, and lots of joy and fun will not cause bad things to happen or bad consequences. Whenever respondents are more cheerful and happy, they can expect bad things that may occur in their life. Meanwhile, they believe that disasters often follow good fortune. Besides, respondents did not consider themselves sadness as compared to their peers. However, experience makes them feel sad. Even small things and situations cannot easily make them sadness as well as they are aware of how to tackle the people/situations that make them feel sad. Further, the respondents believe that they are not well versed in making arguments and will not hit anyone even if they are being provoked. Even in the situation of rage, respondents don't break things. Respondents have not threatened people in their network. Likewise, respondents are amazed when people are nice to them. The study findings further claim that the majority of respondents feel disgusted when they see someone accidentally stick a fishing hook through his/her finger. The positive emotions may lead the students to live their life happily and to reduce the "sadness", and "fear". In such a way, the outcomes considerably contribute to expanding state of the art about emotional indicators of students. As the implications of the results are concerned, it will assist parents, educational institutions, and policymakers in evaluating the emotional perspectives of students, which can help in building a healthy learning environment for the students. The management-bodies of schools should also attempt to create a positive environment within the school, which may include facilities in creating positive emotions [60 -62].
Although this study provides novel insights to the state-ofart and advances the pertinent literature, nevertheless, it suffers from two limitations. Firstly, the survey respondents were selected from three cities. Therefore, further study can be carried out on a large scale by increasing the number of cities and survey respondents. Secondly, this study explores the aspects of students. Thus, it would be fruitful to include the respondents from other backgrounds to increase the generalization of research findings.

ETHICS APPROVAL AND CONSENT TO PARTI-CIPATE
Not applicable.

HUMAN AND ANIMAL RIGHTS
Not applicable.

CONSENT FOR PUBLICATION
Not applicable.

AVAILABILITY OF DATA AND MATERIALS
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (A.A) upon reasonable request.

FUNDING
None.