Efklides (2006). Metacognition and affect: What can metacognitive experiences tell us about the learning process?

Affect is never my domain since my background is more in cognition... did get something out of this paper... the impact of affect on the processing at the meta and object level (as per the language of Nelson and Narens).

Efklides, Anastasia. (2006). Metacognition and affect: What can metacognitive experiences tell us about the learning process? Educational Research Review, 1(1), 3-14. 

"What I shall try to show is that metacognitive experiences and, especially, metacognitive feelings, have a dual character, that is, a cognitive and an affective one.

1. The facets of metacognition

"Fuzziness in the conceptualization of the term "metacognition" (Flavell, 1987)"

"There are two basic manifestations of the monitoring function, namely, metacognitive knowledge [MK] and metacognitive experience.  Metacognitive skills or use of strategies, on the other hand, are manifestations of the control function."

Please see the following for the facets of metacognition and their manifestation.

"[MK] also comprise knowledge of the criteria of validity of knowledge, what is being called "epistemic cognition.  One could argue that theory of mind is also an instance of MK, although the theorists in the field do not make this connection."

"Metacognitive skills (MS) is procedural knowledge... part of the so called 'executive process' or 'metacognitive strategies... self-regulation cannot be reduced to MS.'"

"The critical question for application of MS, however, is how does the person know when s/he needs to apply MS... Metacognitive experiences (ME) comprise metacognitive feelings and metacognitive judgments/estimates that are based on the monitoring of task-processing feature and/or of its outcome.  They also involve online task-specific knowledge."

"ME are present in working memory... and they can be affectively charged.-- in the case of metacognitive feeling... products of the monitoring of good functioning and have the quality of pleasant and unpleasant.  Thus, metacognitive feelings inform the person about a feature of cognitive processing, but they do it in an experiential way... in the form of a feeling, such as feeling ofknowing, feeling of confidence, etc."

"Metacognitive feelings and metacognitive judgments [e.g., feeling of knowing] are products of nonanalytic, nonconscious inferential processes, particularly when there are conditions that do not allow full analysis of the situation."

"A person working on a learning task... negative affect, be it feeling of difficulty or feeling of dissatisfaction, calls for control decisions.  The control decisions can be triggered automatically, without conscious awareness, or consciously through the analysis of the situation based on one's MK."

"Experts right from  the beginning of task processing identify the critical task features and information, whereas novices refer to superficial task characteristics irrelevant to the procedures needed to deal with the task."

2. Metacognitive experience

Feeling of difficulty is the product of the interaction of factors including the affective factors, such as mood.

3. Metacognitive experiences and affect

"ME monitor the progress being made towards one's goal and they convey this information in an affective or cognitive manner... information can trigger the affective regulatory loop and/or the cognitive one, thus guiding the self-regulatory process in both the short and the long run."

"at least in specific types of task, cognition and emotion co-exist in the processing of information and regulation of behavior.  Furthermore, there is growing neuropsychological evidence that the anterior cingulate cortex is associated with the regulation of both cognitive emotional processing.  This is exactly the area also involved in metacognitive processes."

Keep on seeing anterior cingulate cortex
When all focused on cognitive work, I can be a major league bitch from hell
When emotionally charged and being angry, I can not bring myself back down
Life before hospitalization is one emotionally charged event after another, possibly all dedicated to emotion and cognition... nothing left for metacognition especially in the psychotic department of metacognition.

"One theory that links affect with "meta-" level processes and explains the role of affect in the regulation of cognition is the one proposed by Carver and Scheier (1998) and Carver (2003).  This theory posits two basic types of feedback loop: one feedback loop informs on the attainment of one's goal, whereas the second monitor the rate of the progress towards one's goal.  This is a metalevel feedback loop that manifest subjectively as affect and as a hazy sense of expectancy... positive feelings... inform that there is a discrepancy in the positive direction and, therefore, effort can be reduced.  This easing on effort brings back the system to the dired rate of progress towards the focal goal and, at the same time, frees resources to be invested in the achievement of other possible goals."

"... one possible reason is that negative affect limits the available resources to be invested in the task, so no extra effort was allocated to it."

But how?  That's my question.

"Positive and negative affect, through their interaction with ME, have an immediate affect on the self-regulation of ongoing activity as well as on the person's emotions that endorse engagement with or disengagement from one's goal."

Affect-->Monitoring-->Control
or in me...
Affect-->tie it all up and can't let go of existing processes, cognitively or affectively-->failure to perform task switch (meta, executive)--> possibly simply jammed up the processing power and could it be an indication of the insufficient power of metacognition.

5. Implications for the learning process

"if students rely completely on ready made answers for the solution of problems or on other people's help for dealing with a task, then they do not capitalize on their ME, they do not elaborate on the source of difficulty, and they do not associate their ME with strategies or with procedural knowledge that can resolve the problem they face.  Thus students do not "learn" from their ME and cannot regulate their figure behavior and action successfully."

Learning to live with psychosis is like learning to walk or learning to ride a bicycle.  You simply have to do it and you can't pretend the outcome without going through the motions.

6. Conclusion

"ME are transitory and highly sensitive to person, task, situation and context effects, redering them highly variable.  As a consequence, the information they convey is not always accurate, or may go unnoticed or, even, be misinterpreted.  This implies that one has to "learn" the meaning of his/her ME and understand the conditions that give rise to them if s/he is to be in charge of his/her cognition."

Before anyone else... learn about thyself.

"It seems that increased knowledge and expertise in a domain lead to better calibration of the ME."

The domain of psychosis... the dual-reality world?

As Paris (2002) pointed out, metacognition can be helpful, benign, or debilitating.

Tell me about it... me and my out-of-whack metacognition!  lol sigh