Abstract—In the age of intelligence, the new information technology greatly expanded the frontier of online language education, which also complicated the educational field. Along with the embedding of technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, the interaction of learners’ personality systems changed drastically in the mixed virtual-real online language learning environment characteristic of technology immersion, resulting in the infiltration of implicit affect. Implicit affect exerts an indelible influence on learners’ mentality unconsciously via the explicit affect triggered up by blended language learning and teaching activities. Modelling Quirin’s empirical paradigm of implicit affect and the IPANAT scale he developed, the paper presents a small-scale quasi-experimental study to identify the implicit affect aroused in online language learning, categorizing the implicit affect in accordance with the discrete emotion model and specifying the working mechanism of different implicit affect through descriptive analysis and correlation analysis. Finally, the paper constructs an interpretive frame for implicit affect’s influence on learners’ mentality on the basis of PSI theory.  
 

Keywords—PSI theory, online language learning, implicit affect, working mechanism 

Cite: Ran Li, "The Working Mechanism of Implicit Affect in Online Language Learning Based on PSI Theory," International Journal of Learning and Teaching, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 301-309, December 2023. doi: 10.18178/ijlt.9.4.301-309

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