Strategies of Regulating Academic Emotions in the Light of Openness to Experience and Mental Wandering Among Students of the Faculty of Education: A Structural Equation Modeling and Cluster Analytic Approach

The aim of the research was to reveal the prevalence percentages  of strategies of regulating academic emotions.  The research also aimed to determine the degree of relative contribution of each of openness to experience and mental wandering in predicting strategies for regulating academic emotions (adaptive and non-adaptive)  of the participants, and to verify the possibility of reaching a model that shows the causal relationships between the research variables. In addition, the research  sought to find out the possibility of classifying the participants into clusters that reflect internally homogeneous profiles that are distinct among themselves, according to their scores in the variables of the current research. The sample of the research included (300) male and female students, with an average age of (19.7), and a standard deviation (1.3). The descriptive approach was adopted to achieve the research objectives, and three self-report instruments were used to collect research data and measure its three variables, after verifying their psychometric properties. The results of the research showed that the strategy of developing competencies was the most common among the research sample, and that strategies for regulating adaptive academic emotions can be predicted through both cultural openness and the two dimensions of mental wandering; deliberate and spontaneous. The results also indicated that strategies of regulating non-adaptive academic emotions can be predicted through spontaneous mental wandering. The results also confirmed the existence of a causal model that shows the relationships between the variables of this research, and that the participants can be classified into three clusters that reflect internally homogeneous profiles according to the research variables.