This paper examines the similarities and differences between academic stress and emotion regulation and investigates that the association between emotion regulation and academic stress may be explained the level of academic success among female students.

This research suggests that students vary in their ability to regulate emotions and cope with academic stress, and these abilities may differ across the level of student's academic success. Identifying the academic stress and quality of emotion regulation strategies will lead to practical implications for promoting student's with low or high academic success.

The present study aims to compare academic stress and emotion regulation in the female students with high and low academic performance.

A total of 162 high school students (mean age = 15.26) were selected by cluster random sampling method. They were categorized as students with high (87 students) and low (75 students) academic performance by average of their academic performance. Emotion regulation questionnaire, educational stress scale for adolescents and academic performance were administered. One-way MANOVA was conducted on academic stress and emotion regulation.

The results of analysis were significant only for emotion regulation, F (5, 156) = 5.34, P = .001. Mean score of students with low academic performance in the emotion regulation was significantly lower than students with high academic performance.

The extent to which variation in emotion regulation and coping with stress can be considered as a key factor of academic failure/success in educational settings.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.