Emotions in engineering education: state of the art and future directions

This editorial synthesizes the special issue Emotions in engineering education: Widening perspectives in a rapidly growing field of research. It shows how the included studies reposition emotions from peripheral outcomes to central mechanisms shaping engineering cultures, indentities, responsibilities, and professional practice, while also broadening the field’s topical, methodological, and theoretical scope. Across diverse empirical contexts, the included studies illustrate how emotions are shaped by social, cultural, institutional, and political processes. Examining learning and performance, sociotechnical responsibility, marginalization and inclusion, professional socialization, and emotional labour, they demonstrate that engineering cultures regulate not only knowledge and behaviour but also emotion norms, recognition, and expression. Authors leverage psychological, sociological, cultural, and critical perspectives, and they employ qualitative, physiological, behavioural, and AI-assisted approaches to investigate emotions as embodied, relational, and socially situated phenomena. Future research should further develop multilevel, longitudinal, critical, and theoretically diverse approaches to emotion in engineering education.