Can relaxation exercises improve learning? Mohd Zaliman YUSOFF 1 and Benedict DU BOULAY 2 1 College of Information Technology, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia; 2 IDEAS LAB, University of Sussex, UK Abstract. Students use both domain-dependent strategies (such as seeking specific domain help) and domain-independent strategies (such as relaxation exercises) to help regulate their affective states when learning. This paper reports a study that compared students’ performance in learning data-structures across two systems. While both systems supported domain-dependent strategies, one additionally supported domain-independent strategies (relaxation exercises). The results provide some evidence that students working with both domain-dependent and domain-independent strategies performed better than those working with domain- dependent strategies only. Keywords. Emotions, Affective tutoring system, Domain-independent strategies Introduction Emotions mediated by appropriate attention, self-regulation and motivation strategies have a positive effect on learning and achievement and there is growing concern for the vital role of affect in education [1]. However, the techniques for helping students regulate their emotions employed by current affective tutoring systems do not take proper account of normal emotion regulation strategies. Empirical studies [see e.g. 2,3] provide strong evidence that individuals use both domain-dependent strategies (such as seeking specific help) and domain-independent strategies (such as seeking to relax) to regulate or modulate any overly intense affective state. By contrast, current affective ITS systems [see e.g. 4,5] concentrate very largely on the use of domain-dependent strategies only. In this paper, we describe an experimental study which investigated the effect on students’ learning performance of a relaxation exercise and positive affirmation (two domain-independent strategies) using for affective tutoring involving two stages of affective appraisal proposed in [6]. 1. The effects of relaxation exercises and positive affirmation There were two versions of a system to teach data-structures in an undergraduate course in this between-subjects experiment. The domain-dependent (DD) version provided a certain amount of adaptive help to each student. The DD+DI (domain independent) version provided the same domain level adaptive help as the DD version