With the exception of extensive research on test anxiety, research on emotions experienced by teachers and students in classrooms is still in its infancy. In particular, little research has explored the emotional arousal of classroom participants in the teaching and learning of specific subject matter such as science (Rosiek and Beghetto 2009). However, overall, it is now clear that emotions have a profound effect on students’ and teachers’ interest, engagement, performance, and achievement. In short, emotions appear to be central to understanding teaching and learning (Pekrun and Schutz 2007). Moreover, the centrality of emotions to daily life is evident in the realization that every dimension of society is held together or ripped apart by emotional arousal (Turner 2007). Defining emotion has been an elusive challenge because it can be studied from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Emotions can be viewed as the complex of causal effects among four interrelated elements, namely, situational cues (e.g., behaviors relevant to achieving a specific task or goal), physiological changes (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure), emotion labels (e.g., happiness, anger, fear, sadness), and expressive gesture (e.g., facial expressions, hand gestures) (Turner 2007). Michalinos Zembylas’ extensive reporting of his three-year ethnographic study of science teaching and learning in an elementary teacher’s classroom not only reaffirmed the pivotal role of emotions in teaching and learning (e.g., Zembylas 2004) but also showed how emotional practices could be constructed by the teacher and her students. Yet, the social-constructivist perspective underpinning the study is limited because the arousal of emotion is not simply a labeling or socially constructed process but also involves neural transmissions and physiological functions that can be triggered automatically without conscious effort. This suggests that an integrated theory that embraces rather than ignores the biology of emotions, such as Turner’s sociology of human emotions, offers a promising way forward to researching emotions in educational contexts (Turner 2007). Most scholars agree that the four primary emotions are the following: satisfaction-happiness, aversion-fear, assertion-anger, and disappointment-sadness, which Turner (2007) presumes are hard-wired in human neuroanatomy. Some scholars add surprise and disgust to this list. These primary emotions can be experienced at different levels of intensity and in various combinations that denote the more complex emotions such as shame and guilt. Interest, boredom, and curiosity are sometimes included on lists of emotions, but other times excluded because they are considered cognitive states (Turner 2007). A series of studies conducted by Ritchie and his colleagues (see: http://profiles.murdoch.edu.au/ myprofile/stephen-ritchies/) in a variety of secondary science and teacher education classroom contexts embraced Turner’s theoretical framework that also incorporates related sociological constructs such as positive emotional energy generated from successful interactions. They accept that
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