Rather often, the relation between emotional well-being and performance seems logic and is simply presumed: Higher emotional well-being means higher performance. Investment in students´ emotional well-being may decrease risk behaviour and school drop-out rates, increase academic outcomes and improve a healthy lifestyle in terms of nutrition and physical activity (Durlak et al., 2011). Although empirical evidence indeed supports the presumption that students who feel better also achieve better (e.g. Durlak et al., 2011; Suldo, Thalji, & Ferron, 2011), there is also ample evidence suggesting that, in some cases, the opposite may be true. For instance, it has been shown that negative mental states may inspire students to higher academic performance. Perfectionistic behaviors may be a response to inner mental distress (Giacobello, 2000; Stornelli et al., 2009; Flett et al., 2011). Depressions can encourage students to set difficult goals as an attempt to reduce feelings of depressed mood (Lane, White, Terry, & Nevill, 2004). Anger, without additional depression symptoms, can be a predictor of good performance too, as an increased effort to prove oneself (Lane et al., 2004). Clearly, emotional well-being is not a mere individual trait, but a result and trigger of complex interactions with the environment (Diener, Lucas, & Oishi, 2018). For school-aged adolescents – on which we focus in this study – key persons in the environment include peers, teachers, parents and any other important person (Jansen et al., 2017). 

In other words, the relationship between emotional well-being and performance is complicated, because many discourses support different ideological positions and represent different understandings of equity and social justice, and thus formulate well-being differently (Diener et al., 2018; Spratt, 2019, p. 19). Therefore, emotional well-being is hard to capture in one clear definition and also difficult to position in relation to the multiple other domains in adolescents´ lives (Ben-Arieh, & Frønes, 2011; Diener et al., 2018). Not the least because well-being measures vary across cultures, and are highly subjective and individually different (Diener et al., 2018). Besides, multiple studies revealed that different factors on individual, school and environmental level may explain the quality of (literacy) school performance. Indeed, performance and aspects of cognition can be influenced in multiple different ways and emotional well-being may affect learning, through, for example, attention, motivation, and learning strategies, while emotional well-being itself may be influenced by, among others, personality factors, parental support, identity beliefs, task and instruction type and many more factors (Pekrun, 2014).

In response to studies showing increased outcomes after some form of intervention, schools have been inundated with prevention programmes and student development initiatives, addressing a wide range of matters. Unfortunately, so Weissberg and colleagues (2015) argue, these programmes are often isolated from other programmes and have little direction, coordination, sustainability, or impact. Besides improving implementation strategies, they state that identifying the ´active ingredients´ (p. 13) of such interventions is crucial, as well as avoiding being atheoretical and overinclusive. Future research should confirm, for different age groups, which emotional well-being factors, including environmental features such as cultural and societal dimensions attribute to which outcomes, moving away from stressing universal relationships between too broadly generalized constructs.

Research about the potential influences of adolescents´ emotional well-being on their (literacy) school performance is a desideratum. My thesis will contribute to closing the research gap, while answering the following questions: 1) Which aspects of emotional well-being in adolescents influence which aspects of (literacy) school performance, in which way, and 2) which personal and situational processes may alter these relationships? 

The search engines ERIC, PsycINFO and Web of Science are used to secure a representative sample of published and peer-reviewed studies. Firstly, an exploratory search was conducted in search engine ERIC in order to define emotional well-being keywords and the terms describing the age group adolescent and (literacy) school performance as type of outcome. In the first round, abstracts are collected, duplicates are removed and relevant abstracts are selected in the software ASreview, while calculating Cohen´s Kappa for interrater reliability (EPPI-centre, 2019; Cooper, 2017; Alexander, 2020). Studies eligible for review are (a) written in English, (b) appeared after 1990 in published and peer-reviewed form, (c) target students between the ages of 10 and 18, with or without any identified adjustment or learning problems, (d) emphasize at least one emotional well-being aspect and one (literacy) school performance aspect, (e) include empirical data, (f) provide information on the research process, including quality criteria. In the second round, the full articles are screened for relevance, by scrutinizing in more detail if the studies meet the inclusion criteria (based on Cooper, 2017, EPPI-centre, 2019). In step 3, all articles are coded by using a systematic coding scheme that was developed to contain key information from each publication. This involves in-depth content analysis of each full article, from their abstract and keywords to their theoretical framework, hypotheses, methods, results and discussion. The coding categories are discussed in the author´s colloquial meetings and codes were revised as necessary. The qualitative and quantitative data are analyzed separately (Cooper, 2017). Bias in the quantitative studies is controlled by calculating confidence intervals, ideally with forest plots. After the separate analysis of qualitative and quantitative studies, the research questions are answered by grouping similar studies, moderators and outcomes, illuminating overlap between studies with different foci and point out controversies. All articles are analyzed using frequency and content analysis to identify the main topics in the literature. The final synthesis of studies is presented as a combination of commented summary tables and a structured narrative to present results from qualitative studies.

By using systemized search procedures, it is expected to find studies from many parts of the world. It is expected that both quantitative and qualitative studies are found, using different frameworks, explanatory mediator and moderator variables, while investigating similar phenomena: the relationship between emotional well-being and (literacy) performance. It is expected that this relationship can be bidirectional and that multiple different factors on individual, environmental and school levels mediate or moderate this relationship. Through the synthesis of results from different contexts, it is hoped that this study may contribute to the development of better adolescent support and earlier detection of mental health and emotional well-being problems as well as better understanding of under- or overachievement.

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