Abstract: Academic emotions refer to students’ achievement emotions experienced in school or university settings. The domain of academic emotions covers not only students’ achievement emotions relating to success and failure but also emotions relating to instruction or to the process of studying. According to valence and arousal dimensions, academic emotions include positive-high arousal emotions, positive-low arousal emotions, negative-high arousal emotions and negative-low arousal emotions. An effective academic emotions questionnaire was developed basing on theoretical considerations and interview results, three samples consisting of 1071 adolescents. Reliability and validity research showed that the coefficient of homogeneity and split reliability were high. The construct validity and criterion validity were satisfactory. The resulting set of emotions contains the positive-high arousal emotions of pride, enjoyment and hope, as well as the positive-low arousal emotions of contentment, calmness and relief, and the negative-high arousal emotions of anxiety, shame and anger, as well as the negative-low arousal emotions of boredom, hopelessness, depression and fatigue. Through surveying 3588 adolescents, this study explored the characteristics of academic emotions of adolescents. Significant effects of grade and gender in adolescents were found. Adolescents in junior high schools had more positive academic emotions and less negative academic emotions than the ones in senior high schools. Male students had more positive academic emotions and less negative academic emotions than females. The questionnaire was a useful tool to measure the academic emotions of adolescents

Key words: academic emotions, adolescents, the process of developing a questionnaire