Hi Michelle,
This post isn't related to you current research, just food for thought...
Have you come across any of the work by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman? http://www.princeton.edu/~kahneman/ One of his hypotheses is that there can be strong cognitive biases between what he calls our present selves (experiencing ourselves in the moment) and the memory of ourselves (what we remember of those experiences in hindsight). He believes that how an experience ends affects our memory of it significantly more than the rest of the experience, e.g. "I listened to a beautiful symphony for 20 minutes but there was this loud screeching sound at the end of the recording which ruined it for me." -- The person didn't remember the 20 minutes of enjoyment as much as the noise at the end and concludes that the 20 minutes weren't enjoyable.
In learning and teaching practice, I've done a lot of classroom observations. I've seen the emotionally charged struggles that learners go through while grappling with new concepts. I think this gets amplified when teachers use unconventional approaches and methods, e.g. learner-led and social constructivist oriented curricula, which is reflected in student feedback forms where on the Likert scales, opinions tend to be at the extreme ends, i.e. learners either report that they loved it or hated it, with little in between (very large standard deviations). Follow up surveys and informal conversations with learners weeks after the courses are completed show a distinct change in attitude in some of the learners who initially reported poor and bad experiences. I think that with reflective hindsight and after experiencing how much they'd benefited from developing their analytical and critical as well as their meta-cognitive and teamwork skills, they view their learning experiences very differently. I also reckon that different learners take different lengths of time to process things like this and some may just not be all that reflective without being prompted.
I suspect that if we could measure and track learners' emotional states, unintrusively during their learning experiences and compared those with learners' reports after them, that there would be significant discrepancies, i.e. actual vs. reported. As you probably already know, the role of emotion is getting increased attention in its contribution to cognitive development and learning in research. I remember reading an article about wristbands being used in a learning and teaching research project but I can't remember the title. Here's Rosalind Picard's presentation about using "Smart Wristbands" for measuring emotion: http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2014-rosalind-w-picard-lecture (running time 1 hour).
I think the combination of data from directly observing learners' emotional states while they're learning, with data from their interactions with other learners and any reflections or journaling they do, and with what they report in surveys, polls, interviews, stimulated recall, etc., and with their measured learning gains (effect sizes), could be highly revealing and give us valuable insights into their learning experiences; rich data to give a fuller picture of what happens.
Rosalind Picard's profile page at MIT: http://web.media.mit.edu/~picard/index.php
I hope this is interesting for you.
In the spirit of sharing