Academic Emotions Under Pressure: Developmental Trajectories and the Role of Shift-and-Persist in High School Students

High school is often an academically demanding environment that exposes adolescents to elevated emotional challenges. Yet the development of academic emotions across the full high school period, as well as the potential protective role of adaptive coping strategies such as shift-and-persist, remains insufficiently understood. To address this gap, the present study tracked 608 students (305 males; Mage = 15.56, SD = 0.58) from a public senior high school in Chongqing, China, over three consecutive years. Latent growth modeling showed that negative academic emotions increased steadily, whereas positive emotions remained relatively stable. Cross-lagged panel analyses further revealed that greater use of shift-and-persist strategies—a coping approach integrating cognitive reappraisal with optimistic persistence—was prospectively associated with more favorable emotional outcomes, reflected in higher positive and lower negative emotions. In contrast, academic emotions did not predict later use of S-P. These findings point to the cumulative emotional challenges adolescents face in competitive academic settings and highlight S-P as a stable psychological resource. The study extends the control-value framework by identifying a cognitive-affective pathway associated with emotional well-being and emphasizes the potential value of promoting S-P-related coping skills within educational settings.