Managing Cognitions and Emotions: Supporting Adolescent Wellbeing in the Transition to Secondary School

The key educational transition from primary to secondary school occurs during the sensitive developmental period of early adolescence, when students are developing self-regulatory abilities and facing a new array of challenges. Of concern, a decline in wellbeing has been observed following this educational transition. However, little is known about how the self-regulation of cognitions (metacognition) and emotions (emotion regulation) are related to adolescent students’ wellbeing following this transition. Here, we investigate whether metacognition and emotion regulation are related to student’s subjective academic and personal wellbeing, in a sample of 134 students (59 male, 75 female) aged 12-14 years (M = 12.88 years, SD = 0.67 years) in the early years of Australian secondary school. This study was cross-sectional, and data were collected in 2022/2023. Participants completed a series of computer-based tasks and questionnaires designed to capture metacognition, emotion regulation, executive functions (working memory, attention control and cognitive flexibility) and wellbeing (academic wellbeing and personal wellbeing). Both metacognition and emotion regulation made significant and distinct contributions to adolescents’ academic and personal wellbeing, with metacognition playing a larger role in academic wellbeing and emotion regulation making larger contributions to personal wellbeing. Of import, the contributions of metacognition and emotion regulation to wellbeing were observed after accounting for underlying individual differences in executive functions. These findings suggest that improving both metacognition and emotion regulation during early adolescence could have positive impacts on student wellbeing, regardless of differences in students’ underlying abilities.